SPECIAL FEATURE
Promoting women’s economic empowerment stands for creating equal economies, where every woman has equal access, equal agency and equal leadership within her community.
Preeti Sinha, UNCDF, Executive Secretary
PHOTO: JonoErasmus – stock.adobe.com
OFQ : Your development model is built on using capital as the fuel of development. Is this model still sustainable or does the world need new approaches to establish more equal societies and more sustainable growth? PS: The COVID-19 pandemic spurred the largest level of Official Development Assistance (ODA) in recorded history – over US$161 billion. While this is a substantial amount of funding, it is not enough to fill the SDG finance gap, which is in the trillions. The point is that without private capital, we will not be able to fund the finance solutions that can truly deliver sustainable development at global scale. But this is not a binary scenario either. In the development space, we often hear the term billions to trillions. This is in reference to the need for the billions in ODA to catalyze the trillions in commercial capital and private finance. Concessional capital in the form of ODA
can play an essential role in de-risking investments and projects to make them more palatable for commercial finance. Blended finance is a signature tool of the UNCDF. If you look across all our priority areas the common thread is blended finance. In all these areas we are relying on our grant funding, our technical assistance, our expertise in innovative finance, as well as our on-
balance sheet and off-balance sheet investment portfolios to play a catalytic role in unlocking private capital. Through our partnership with the OPEC Fund we will be able to deliver this value at precisely the right time to do so – when we still have time to ensure that this decade does meet the expectation of serving as the decade of action for the implementation of the SDGs.
FACTFILE: UNCDF The UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) makes public and private finance work for people in the world’s 46 least developed countries. The UNCDF offers last mile finance models that unlock public and private resources, especially at the domestic level, to reduce poverty and support local economic development. The UNCDF works through inclusive digital economies, local transformative finance and investment finance.
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