What is TOSSD?
Total Official Support for Sustainable Development (TOSSD) is an international standard for measuring the full array of resources to promote the sustainable development of developing countries. It is designed to monitor all official resources flowing into developing countries for their sustainable development, but also private resources mobilised through official means. It also measures contributions to International Public Goods.
Why is TOSSD needed?
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for a comprehensive measure of support to developing countries. TOSSD responds to this need.
Many countries and multilateral organisations track the support they provide to promote sustainable development in developing countries. But, the risk of getting a multitude of statistical datasets is real. This would affect comparability and data usage by recipient countries and other stakeholders.
TOSSD is a statistical framework agreed by a large, diverse group of countries and organisations. It aims to ensure a coherent, comparable, unified system to track SDG-related investments. TOSSD informs development planning, SDG monitoring and helps identify priorities to finance sustainable development.
The greater focus on sustainable development is not the only change in the financial landscape. This landscape also has more and new actors, and new financial instruments. TOSSD better reflects this complex landscape than existing international statistics on development finance.
Who is developing TOSSD and how?
Since 2024, The International Forum on TOSSD (IFT) maintains and improves the TOSSD standard, collect and analyse TOSSD data, and promote TOSSD worldwide. Click here to learn more about the IFT and its inclusive membership.
The IFT replaces the International TOSSD Task Force. Created in 2017, the Task Force was an inclusive group of experts from provider countries, recipient countries and multilateral organisations.
As the international community called for the development of TOSSD in an “open, inclusive and transparent manner” in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda in 2015, all documents discussed at both the Task Force and the IFT are publicly available.
The Secretariat leads the day-to-day implementation of TOSSD. It collects and publishes TOSSD data and works to enhance data reporting and use. The Secretariat operates under the guidance of the Steering Group. For administrative purposes, the International Forum on TOSSD (IFT) Secretariat is hosted by the OECD.
What are the key milestones?
In 2024, the International Forum on TOSSD started operations. 121 providers reported TOSSD data on 2022 activities.
In 2023, the UN Statistical Division published for the first time TOSSD data submitted for the SDG indicator 17.3.1.
In 2022, TOSSD was recognised as a data source for indicator 17.3.1 of the SDG global indicator framework to measure development support. Four countries were added to the TOSSD recipients list: Chile, Cook Islands, Seychelles, and Uruguay.
In 2021, the TOSSD Secretariat published the first set of TOSSD data on 2019 activities, collected from 90 providers. The TOSSD Secretariat launched tossd.org and the online data visualisation tool.
In 2020, TOSSD was included in the G20 Financing for Sustainable Development Framework.
In 2019, the Task Force published the first version of the TOSSD methodology (TOSSD Reporting Instructions). Besides, for the first time, a G7 document referenced TOSSD.
In 2017, the first meeting of the International TOSSD Task Force took place.
In 2015, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda was agreed and in its paragraph 55, the international community committed to holding "open, inclusive and transparent discussions (...) on the proposed measure of total official support for sustainable development” (TOSSD).