SDG Financing Effectiveness Model — Comoros

The brief

Like many small economies, Comoros faces the question of how to allocate limited public resources across the Sustainable Development Goals — under tight fiscal constraints, with multiple sources of financing (domestic and external, public and private), and with cross-SDG dependencies that mean spending in one area shapes outcomes in others.

The UN Resident Coordinator’s Office in Comoros approached HumanitarianMatters to design an analytical tool that brings rigour and transparency to that allocation question — moving it from intuition and political-economy bargaining toward an evidence base that the Government, the UN Country Team, and partners can share.

What the tool does

The tool is built around a quantitative forecasting model. At a high level, it supports three things:

• Assessing effectiveness. Looking at how spending across different SDGs has translated into development outcomes in Comoros and comparable contexts.
• Comparing across goals. Identifying where each additional unit of spend appears to do the most work — and where it does the least.
• Simulating spending mixes. Allowing decision-makers to ask “what if we shifted resources from here to there?” and see the implied effect on development outcomes.

Crucially, the model accounts for interactions between SDGs: spending on health affects education outcomes; spending on infrastructure affects livelihoods; and so on. Treating each SDG in isolation would systematically misjudge what works.

Who it’s for

The intended users sit on two sides of the same conversation: the Government of Comoros — particularly its planning and finance functions — and the UN Country Team, which coordinates partner support around the country’s development priorities. The tool is built to be used by both, and to give them a shared analytical language for the spending-allocation conversation.

Why it matters

Allocation decisions in development finance are often made without a clear view of which spending choices have actually moved the needle, or how spending in one area interacts with another. For a country with the fiscal profile of Comoros, those questions are not abstract: they shape what the country can credibly commit to, and what partners should be asked to support. The model is a piece of analytical infrastructure designed to make those conversations sharper.