UNCDF in Action: Look Back at Last Week's #FFD2022
For the UN Capital Development Fund, this year's ECOSOC Forum on Financing for Development (FFD) was a platform for UNCDF to display its wide expertise in a variety of areas in innovative finance: climate finance, capital instruments, local transformative finance, women's economic empowerment and portfolio investment. With the FFD behind us, UNCDF offers a set of materials featuring our programming from last week's forum.
Over US$60 million has been committed from six member states and development institutions representing Canada, the United States, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden and the Nordic states through the Nordic Development Fund—to the BUILD Fund, a blended impact investment vehicle, as well as its associated technical assistance facility, to finance small and medium-sized businesses in the world’s least developed countries (LDCs) to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Bamboo-UNCDF Initiative for the Least Developed (“BUILD”) is an innovative blended impact finance vehicle designed to bring finance to small-and-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and entities that have the potential for strong development impact in the world’s frontier markets or least developed countries.
Click here to learn more about the 60+ million in financial commitments to the BUILD Fund
Click here to learn more about the BUILD Fund
UN-Habitat and UNCDF Announce Cities Investment Facility to Finance Sustainable Cities
The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) today announced the launch of the Cities Investment Facility—which will advance and support sustainable financing at the local level, including for the world’s 46 least developed countries—as part of a partnership between the two organizations. UNCDF and UN-Habitat will aim to raise USD 40 million over the next four years to support the programming, operations and technical support needed to finance the partnership. The goal of both organizations under the partnership is to reach 250 cities through their sustainable finance support by the year 2025.
UNCDF Announces City Score Card and IncluCivity Index to Advance Women's Economic Empowerment
Together with a group of experts including from UN Habitat, UNCDF is developing specialized tools that include the City Score Card and the IncluCivity Index. The City Score card is an important tool that will be used to rank cities on their commitment to and investments for the ‘inclusion’ agenda. Score card indicators measure the effectiveness of the city polices, systems, plans and investments against inclusion criteria via qualitative and quantitative metrics. The IncluCivity Index will be used for the selection and ranking of municipal investment projects based on the potential benefits for the excluded and marginalized groups. This is the first tool of its kind that will combine inclusion and investment objectives.
Both initiatives will be advanced through UNCDF's IncluCity programme, which aims to address the bottlenecks to inclusive development in cities and to test and promote local solutions led by municipalities and local institutions with strong voices ensuring participation of vulnerable groups
On 26th April, 2022, the Government of Malawi and Chair of the LDC Group, with UNCDF, UNDP and the GCF brought together global leaders to highlight the actions needed for developing countries, particularly LDCs, to leverage the potential of green debt markets to scale up climate action.
