Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

Guest blog by Stephanie Hodge: UN Partnerships Specialist is a globally recognized leader in strategic evaluation, systems transformation, and cross-sectoral program design, with over 30 years of experience in 140+ countries. She is a go-to evaluator for the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and a trusted advisor to the UN system, World Bank, ADB, AfDB, and Ro me-based institutions, known for evaluating what truly matters: systems, coherence, and catalytic impact. originally published here. In the UN system, overlapping mandates aren’t a mistake—they’re baked in. When UNICEF, UNFPA, and UN Women all show up with a stake in adolescent girls’ futures, the overlap isn’t the issue. The real challenge is what we do with it. Too often, the result is duplication, confusion, or competition dressed up as coordination. But as someone who’s evaluated more joint programmes than I can count—from gender equality to climate resilience to education and governance—I’ve come to one conclusion: joint p...

Guest blog by Stephanie Hodge ,  UN Partnerships Specialist Sevilla, Spain, July 2025. Another UN conference has ended, another lofty declaration adopted—this time the “Sevilla Commitment,” promising to mobilize trillions in financing, tackle the debt crisis, and give developing countries a stronger voice. We’ve been here before. Monterrey in 2002, Doha in 2008, Addis Ababa in 2015—each was billed as a turning point. Each offered earnest compacts to rebalance a system skewed against the Global South. And each failed to deliver the structural change that sustainable development demands. If we are honest, the problem has never been a shortage of ideas. It has been a shortage of courage to challenge the entrenched interests that profit from the status quo. The evidence is clear. As leaders applauded the Sevilla Platform of Action, 3 billion people lived in countries spending more on debt repayments than on health or education. In 2024 alone, low- and middle-income countries paid $443 ...