UN Capital Development Fund

09/04/2026

"What I have now is hope. I can work, I can plan, and I can build something for my children."

Amina Sheik Isse's is a displaced entrepreneur in Baidoa, Somalia, who runs a vegetable stall, employs two other displaced women, and supports a family of eleven. Her business started with a loan of around $1,200.

📍 Somalia is facing one of the world's most severe displacement crises. More than four million people have been forced from their homes. For most of them, rebuilding a livelihood in an urban area means navigating a formal financial system that was not designed for people without collateral, credit history, or stable income.

🤝 The UNCDF Financing Durable Solutions for Forcibly Displaced Persons initiative, supported by the Swiss Development & Cooperation, starts from a different premise: that displaced people are not risks to be avoided, but entrepreneurs to be reached. That the barrier is not their capacity to build a business but the absence of a financial institution willing to lend to them.

🔍 RAAS Microfinance Institution, supported by UNCDF's catalytic grant funding, is that institution in Baidoa and Bosaso. The loans are small. The repayment rates are around 80%. And the outcomes, such as income for families, employment for other displaced women, school fees paid, groceries stocked, are what durable solutions look like on the ground.

For Fos Ali Ibrahim, the loan was her first experience with formal finance.

For Sokor Ali Adan, it was the moment life felt like it was beginning again.

For Amina, it was hope.

🔗 Read the full story — link in comments.

09/03/2026

In Mozambique, it is local governments and communities that face the daily consequences of floods, cyclones, and drought. Yet they are rarely the ones who receive the resources to respond.

☀️ UNCDF's Local Climate Adaptive Living Facility changes that. LoCAL channels climate finance directly to local governments as grants, delivered through national systems, to cover the additional costs of building infrastructure that can withstand future shocks.

Communities identify the priorities. Local governments lead the procurement.

📍 In Gaza and Inhambane provinces, that process led communities to prioritise reinforced maternity centers, clinics, schools, and water infrastructure.

🤝 Since 2014, Belgium has invested nearly $12 million through LoCAL in Mozambique. In 2025 alone, 24 climate-resilient infrastructures valued at $3.23 million were prioritised across the two provinces.

In 2026, LoCAL is expanding beyond grants with a new market finance window, LoCAL+, to deepen private sector cooperation and increase the reach of climate finance at the local level.

🔗 Learn more ➡️ https://bit.ly/45mOfe2

Diplomatie.Belgium

09/03/2026

09/02/2026

"As a young woman, when I am on my period and a water challenge occurs at school, I usually end up missing my lessons."

💧 Water access is not just infrastructure. It is education. It is dignity. It is economic participation.

For years, families in Tanga, Tanzania faced daily disruptions from aging pipes and a water system that could not keep pace with a growing city. Women walked miles to collect water. Girls missed school.

In 2024, the Tanga Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Authority issued East Africa's first sub-national green bond, raising $20.8 million to modernize the city's water system. UNCDF provided catalytic funding and investment advisory support to make the transaction possible.

📈 The investment is now financing 60 km of new pipelines, 110 km of pipe rehabilitation, 12,000 smart water meters, and expanded production capacity, with 26,000 people expected to gain access to clean water for the first time.

Behind every infrastructure number is a student who stays in class, a family that stops walking hours for water, a business that can operate reliably.

🔗 Read the full story ➡️ https://bit.ly/43ZstfI

09/01/2026

In Morocco, two transactions illustrate what performance-based catalytic finance looks like in practice.

☀️ In Chefchaouen, a $1.42 million investment modernized the city's public lighting system, transitioning to an energy-efficient LED network through a blend of reimbursable grants and national and municipal contributions. Chefchaouen now stands as a reference model for energy-efficient municipal infrastructure financing in Morocco.

💧 In parallel, through the Africa Adaptation Initiative Food Security Accelerator, UNCDF has supported Jodoor, a Moroccan enterprise developing hydroponic solutions for water-scarce environments, with financing designed to strengthen climate-resilient agriculture and unlock private investment in food systems that smallholder farmers depend on.

Two transactions. Two financing models. One consistent logic: use catalytic capital to prove what is possible, then create the conditions for more to follow.

🔗 Learn more about our work in Morocco ➡️ https://bit.ly/4hTYYnV

08/31/2026

The Pacific's blue economy has a financing gap. And within that gap, women and youth-led businesses face the deepest constraints.

🔵 Eco-tourism ventures.
🔵 Sustainable fishing cooperatives.
🔵 Seaweed farming operations.
🔵 Coastal waste management businesses.

These are enterprises where women and young entrepreneurs are already active, already building commercially viable models, and consistently passed over by lenders who don't yet have the tools to assess them.

📈 The Sustainable Pacific Blue Circle Fund, backed by an EUR 8.8 million European Commission (EU) commitment and built on the foundation of UNCDF's Blue Lending Facility in Fiji, places this at the centre of its design. Across Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, the Fund aims to empower MSMEs with targeted business support, investment readiness assistance, and access to finance, with a specific focus on enterprises led by women and youth.

📍 In Fiji, UNCDF's $920,000 credit guarantee with the Fiji Development Bank has already set the model. The guarantee absorbs the early-stage risk that keeps lenders from engaging. United Nations Development Programme - UNDP builds enterprise capacity. UN Environment Programme tracks environmental impact. The Pacific Insurance and Climate Adaptation Programme provides climate-risk insurance that gives coastal businesses the resilience to survive extreme weather events.

Building a pipeline of investment-ready reef-positive businesses, most of them small, many of them in remote coastal communities, requires patient preparation and coordination across institutions with different mandates and different timeframes.

But the direction is clear. And the Pacific's reefs, and the communities whose livelihoods depend on them, cannot wait for conventional finance to find its way there on its own.

🔗 Read the full story — link in comments.

08/29/2026

"UNDP is creating the conditions in which investments can take place. UNCDF is structuring investments and taking early calculated risk to prove that markets do function."

📍 At the UNDP, UNFPA, and UNOPS Executive Board this week, United Nations Development Programme - UNDP Administrator and UNCDF Managing Director Alexander De Croo shared why the UNDP-UNCDF partnership matters in a time when Official Development Assistance is declining.

🔍 Creating a stable environment does not automatically produce investment. Projects still need to be made bankable. Investment pipelines still need to be built. And in high-risk environments and last-mile markets, that work requires someone willing to go first, absorb part of the risk, demonstrate that it is manageable, and prove that the market functions before larger capital will follow.

🤝 That partnership between UNDP and UNCDF is now taking concrete form in the Policy to Capital Investment Facility, targeting $500 million and combining two complementary capabilities: UNDP's policy and stabilization expertise alongside UNCDF's ability to provide the first type of capital that absorbs early risk and proves markets work.

Two different skills. One purpose: moving capital into the markets where development needs are greatest.

08/28/2026

Five years of UNCDF’s Leaving No One Behind (LNOB) initiative in Uganda has ended. But the work to advance digital and financial inclusion continues.

The experience reinforced three important lessons about what it takes to make digital inclusion work at the last mile:

➡️ Access is only the starting point. Sustained use depends on the people, systems and support that surround a digital service.

➡️ Technology works best when it is embedded. The strongest results came when digital tools were built on existing value chains, institutions and relationships.

➡️ Digital needs a clear purpose. When digital services help people access markets, transact, manage their businesses or access finance, connectivity can become a pathway to economic opportunity.

These lessons provide a strong foundation for the next chapter: FinWise, a 2025–2028 programme from UNCDF to unlock capital flows for the last mile.

08/27/2026

Missed the UNCDF Executive Board? We condensed the hour into 2 minutes.

Here are some highlights:

➡️ Tanzania highlighted their water utility bond that UNCDF helped structure resulting in 65% of the capital raised domestically and demonstrating that subnational infrastructure finance can work through local markets when the right instruments are in place.

➡️ Switzerland, speaking on behalf of China, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Türkiye, and Switzerland, acknowledged the $46.8 million UNCDF mobilized from UN pooled funds in 2025 (up from $21 million the year before) and the plan to scale up loans, guarantees, and grants under the new Strategic Framework.

➡️ Ethiopia welcomed the joint UNDP-UNCDF Policy to Capital Investment Facility, and what the partnership with UNCDF means in practice for women, youth, rural communities, and underserved enterprises.

➡️ And the Group of Least Developed Countries closed with a direct ask: more core and deployable capital for UNCDF because the pipeline is real, the model works, and the gap between what is possible and what is funded is where development is lost.

🎥 Watch the full recap

08/26/2026

"UNCDF has reached a moment of consequence."

This week, at the Executive Board of UNDP, UNFPA and UNOPS, UNCDF Executive Secretary Pradeep Kurukulasuriya made the case for what that moment means and why it matters.

📈 The 2025 financial picture is encouraging. Revenue grew by 40% to $144 million as delivery recovered with expenses reaching $91 million. Compared to 2024, we deployed more grants, more guarantees, and more concessional loans. And UNCDF's pipeline now indicates demand for more than $500 million in capital deployment over the next two years.

The model works. The mandate is recognized. The pipeline is there. The question now is whether the capital base can match the moment.