A decade after their adoption, the UN Sustainable Development Goals still need trillions of dollars of investment.

Ten years ago today, the UN Sustainable Development Goals were adopted by 193 states at the UN General Assembly in New York. Celebrities from Beyoncé to Stephen Hawking and Malala backed the launch.

The then-US President Barack Obama called it a historic achievement. He also warned that emerging and developing nations, “don’t just want aid, they want trade. They want businesses. They want investment”.

In 2025, that observation seems more important than ever. With the doors of aid bodies such as the US Agency for International Development and the UK’s Department for International Development closed, hopes of progressing the goals and the prosperity they will bring increasingly lie not with what governments spend, but in our ability to align the benefits of economic growth and private investment with the achievement of the goals — from ending hunger and poverty to protecting the climate.

The next chapter of global development needs tools and policies that can stimulate long-term economic growth, create jobs, investment and opportunity, and support innovation. Yet, one of the most impactful of those policies — pension policy — is rarely on the agenda at global aid and development talks.

That must change urgently.

Pensions as a development tool

Pension funds play a key role in the health of the economies and financial systems of many countries, including the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands.

The evidence shows that well-constructed, funded pension schemes provide income security for retirees and seed the foundations of local capital markets and support their growth, with the potential to reduce an economy’s reliance on external financing and aid in the long term.

The next chapter of global development needs tools and policies that can stimulate long-term economic growth, create jobs, investment and opportunity, and support innovation

This is a critical point often overlooked in many development discussions.

A strong pension fund sector offers huge opportunities for financing infrastructure, the real economy and economic growth. Unlike most pools of capital, pension funds generally have longer-term investment horizons, giving them the potential to support areas such as early-stage technology, infrastructure or the low-carbon transition.

The US pensions sector, for example, has played an important part in financing innovation and fuelling the growth of the venture capital sector.

Pension systems do more than tackle old-age poverty. By catalysing investment and building a local capital stock, they can make a wider contribution to achieving the SDGs.

South America offers a prominent example. In Chile, the introduction of a mandatory funded pension system in the 1980s was widely seen to encourage growth, and several countries in Latin America and central and eastern Europe have adopted variants of funded, privately managed defined contribution accounts as part of their retirement systems.

As one study found, the countries that implemented these reforms saw a marked increase in the total amount of cumulative net capital issuance or net new capital raised by domestic companies through issuing securities, such as stocks or bonds.

Specifically, the average cumulative net issuance in those domestic markets rose from around 0.7 per cent of GDP to 3.2 per cent of GDP within four years of implementing the reforms.

Read more: Sustainable Views