The purpose of this report is to provide a systematic Commonwealth perspective based on an assessment of how the Resilience Sustainability Trust is working for the countries that were expected to need it most.
The Resilience and Sustainability Trust and its lending arm, the Resilience and Sustainability Facility were created by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2022 to
provide long-term, affordable finance to help low income and vulnerable middle-income countries address structural challenges such as climate change and pandemic preparedness.
The report covers three areas.
First, it maps which Commonwealth members have secured RSF arrangements and which have not, and examines whether SIDS, LDCs and African members are under-represented relative to their climate vulnerability and disaster exposure, as well as how binding the UCT-quality programme requirement has been in practice.
Second, the report evaluates whether the scale of RSF financing for Commonwealth SIDS and LDCs, measured in SDR terms, as a share of quota and as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), is commensurate with their climate and disaster risks, drawing on indicators such as the ND-GAIN Vulnerability Index, EM-DAT disaster loss data and available estimates of adaptation finance gaps.
Third, it assesses whether current RST design features are fair and workable for small states, by quantifying how many Commonwealth SIDS meet each element of the eligibility chain (income, vulnerability, debt sustainability, UCT programme) and identifying which conditions are most constraining.
