Somewhere right now, a blueprint for a climate-resilient clinic is gathering dust. A shovel-ready plan for a regional solar grid sits stalled. When communities waiting for these projects are told that the money is not there, that is not the full story.
There is an abundance of global capital. Private investment flows to developing countries – particularly foreign direct investment – are typically two to three times larger than official development assistance globally, although ODA remains dominant in the poorest and most fragile contexts. The capital to build that clinic and that power grid absolutely exists for many countries. What we face is a failure to connect capital to opportunity.
Investors need confidence. Continuity. Bankable opportunities. Too often, they encounter none of the three. National development plans are ambitious. Financing strategies exist on paper.
What remains missing is the architecture linking ambitious plans to actual capital.
Working as part of the United Nations family, the United Nations Development Programme is committed to fixing this design failure. Not as a bank. Not as a financier. But as a system integrator and facilitator – working with governments to build the system that connects national development priorities to pipelines of impactful and investable opportunities.
From plans to investable pipelines
Moving away from isolated projects, UNDP takes country development priorities and translates them, end to end, into structured, investment-ready pipelines. For governments, this means moving from plans on paper to capital deployed on the ground. For private investors, it means a reliable pipeline of de-risked opportunities in high-growth markets they cannot enter alone. For donors, it means their resources are used to multiply impact.
We are building on proven foundations. In 90 countries, UNDP and our partners support Integrated National Financing Frameworks, national systems that align public budgets, private investment and development cooperation within a single strategy.
These are not abstract tools.
Our technical assistance has already leveraged $8 million to unlock more than $100 million in committed financing across 18 countries – with a target of over $500 million by 2027.
We see this shift in real time.
The UNDP-led Africa Minigrids programme is turning fragmented solar energy access plans into invest-able platforms for private capital. In Zambia, the Green Finance Facility connects the energy transition, agriculture and small business capacities into a single systemic portfolio – resulting in a pipeline of investments.
From 2022 to 2025, governments working with UNDP and our partners aligned existing funding and leveraged new investment totalling over $920 billion to advance the Sustainable Development Goals.
This does not diminish the importance of public finance.
These outcomes are only possible when public finance is deployed to reduce risk, strengthen institutions and create the conditions for private capital to follow. In an environment where public resources are tightening and ODA has decreased, this also presents an opportunity to redefine public finance’s role.
Public finance as a catalyst
ODA was never going to meet the scale of global needs on its own. Its most powerful function is catalytic. That includes de-risking the policy environment so that private capital flows where it otherwise would not, funding the rule of law and institutional reforms that create predictable environments and supporting early-stage project development that makes pipelines bankable. It also means backing grassroots innovation and entrepreneurs – where risk is highest, but the potential for transformation is immense. Overall, this shifts the unit of investment from the individual transaction to an institutional architecture.
Using ODA as a catalyst, one dollar unlocks many more. Used as a substitute for private investment, it will always fall short.
As G7 leaders meet in Évian, they must continue to shift how capital is put to work – away from funding isolated outputs and towards reducing the structural barriers that keep private capital away from the places it is most needed. This includes deploying guarantees and risk-sharing instruments that make viable projects bankable. Crucially, it also means measuring success not by how much public money is spent – but by how much private capital it mobilises.
France’s G7 presidency has placed resilience and shared prosperity at the centre of this summit. Development belongs there. Conflicts, stalled growth and poverty in developing economies are not problems that stay local. They generate migration pressure, supply chain disruptions, and the gradual erosion of the markets and partnerships that G7 economies depend on.
We are not short of capital or ambition.
We are short of the right enabling environment to turn both into results.
Funding isolated projects buys a temporary fix; building the system is the contribution that lasts.
