Resource Category: INNOVATIVE FINANCE
A snapshot of UNDP’s blockchain practice
The publication, a snapshot of UNDP’s blockchain practice, explores how UNDP is engaging with blockchain technologies as part of its broader effort to support inclusive, future-ready public systems.
Situated within the context of accelerating digital transformation and shifting development finance, the publication explains why and how UNDP works with blockchain – not as a stand-alone solution, but as one element within a systems-based approach to innovation, strategic foresight, and public sector reform. It focuses on building pathways for governments and public institutions to explore emerging technologies on their own terms, guided by public-purpose principles, safeguards, and development outcomes.
Drawing on 42 practical use cases from across regions, the report illustrates how experimentation, new partnership models, and public digital infrastructure can help strengthen institutions, improve transparency, and unlock new approaches to financing sustainable development. The portfolio spans early pilots and deployments in areas such as digital payments and financial inclusion, climate and nature finance, digital identity and data governance, and community-led investment models.
Rather than offering a single blueprint, the publication provides a snapshot of an evolving practice – highlighting lessons, trade-offs, and design choices as UNDP supports governments in navigating overlapping digital, financial, and climate transitions.
This publication was developed by the UNDP AltFinLab, drawing on contributions from UNDP Country Offices across regions. It reflects UNDP’s growing practice at the intersection of digital transformation, innovation, and development finance, and is informed by collaboration with governments, public institutions, and a range of technical and ecosystem partners.
The course ” Funding and Finance for Municipalities: A Hands-on Guidance to Improve Project Funding” aims to address and respond to the challenges faced by municipalities in accessing the funding and finance needed to deliver infrastructure projects and sustainable development initiatives. The course will address the challenges of main revenue sources for municipalities, common bottlenecks to accessing funding and finance at a local level, and provide a foreseen solution, better understanding of the enabling conditions to improve access to funding and finance at the municipality level and identification of practical ways to do so.
Municipalities globally are pivotal in delivering essential public services and advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, securing adequate resources and funding for these initiatives remains a persistent challenge. This challenge is especially acute for municipalities in secondary cities within the Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries, which include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. The Mayors for Economic Growth (M4EG), a joint EU and UNDP initiative, aims to support these local governments in overcoming such challenges. While the initiative has made strides in developing economic plans and transformative projects, the task of attracting sufficient investment remains difficult.
This course aims to identify the primary obstacles municipalities in the EaP face in accessing diverse financial resources and propose solutions and recommendations for tackling these obstacles. The findings emphasize the need for enhanced resource mobilization strategies to empower municipalities to fund and implement their development goals successfully.
Municipalities globally are pivotal in delivering essential public services and advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, securing adequate resources and funding for these initiatives remains a persistent challenge. This challenge is especially acute for municipalities in secondary cities within the Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries, which include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine.
The Mayors for Economic Growth (M4EG), a joint EU and UNDP initiative, aims to support these local governments in overcoming such challenges. While the initiative has made strides in developing economic plans and transformative projects, the task of attracting sufficient investment remains difficult.
This research aims to identify the primary obstacles municipalities in the EaP face in accessing diverse financial resources and propose solutions and recommendations for tackling these obstacles. The financing research is directly aligned with UNDP’s strategic priorities by focusing on enhancing the financial management, resource mobilization, project delivery, and transparency of local governments. It aims to equip municipal officials with the knowledge and tools needed to effectively manage their finances and projects, and in turn, contribute to the achievement of sustainable development at the local level.
The Tadamon Crowdfunding Academy is an interactive training program that empowers and builds the capacities of organizations to gain the necessary knowledge and skills on how to prepare and run a successful crowdfunding campaign.
The program is intended for civil society organizations that want to start, expand, or rebuild their businesses using online tools and innovative methodologies. Through interactive modules and tools, organizations will learn how to create elements of crowdfunding campaigns so that in the end, they will be able to launch their crowdfunding campaign. Organizations will have a chance to work with top crowdfunding experts from around the world who will offer guidance and feedback.
By the end of the training, organizations would have developed elements such as communication strategy, visual and textual elements, rewards, etc which will enable them to launch their crowdfunding campaign. The training is run entirely online, but depending on the Covid-19 situation – capacity building workshops can be organized through a combination of virtual or in-person meetings with local partners, crowdfunding experts, and our team
The academy is run on Kaya, a global learning platform by the Humanitarian Leadership Academy. If you’d like to run a crowdfunding academy in your country, please get in touch with us at irh.innovation@undp.org.
CedarCoin is digital asset created to recognize the planting event of a cedar tree in Lebanon. The value of a CedarCoin is in the functional rewards and social recognition given to those who are helping to reforest Lebanon.
Live Lebanon, a project of UNDP Lebanon, aims to shift donation based support for restoration to investment in native tree nursery production and spark country-wide restoration of communal forest lands by local NGOs and communities. CedarCoin unifies investments across local NGOs and communities for reforestation projects and wildfire management practices to ensure sustainable landscape restoration.
The potential of block chains to disrupt industrial sectors, commercial processes, governmental structures or economic systems seems to know no bounds. We suggest that the transformative power of block chain technology should not be seen as a threat to existing systems of governance; rather, it should be seen as an opportunity for national and international institutions to defend the rights of those they represent and to accelerate our collective progress towards meeting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
Block chains can bring transparency to opaque or corrupt systems, and verifiability and immutability to commercial processes. They can bring security and resilience to vulnerable infrastructure, ensure individual privacy whilst guaranteeing autonomy, and encourage cooperation and engender trust where they are needed most.
Block chains can ease the frictions that prevent a vast array of sustainability, humanitarian, and environmental initiatives from fulfilling their potential.
This white paper explains how this unconventional technology works and how it is already being used to pursue conventional ends. It illustrates how block chains have brought new levels of efficiency and effectiveness to the fields of development aid, supply chain management, renewable energy, economic growth, and several others.
Our aim has been to show how governments, NGOs, and citizens are working together, exploiting the versatility of block chain technology to form new, powerful partnerships. We address the risks posed by this nascent technology and suggest how these risks should be managed.
After seven academies, 40 campaigns, and more than 400 people educated on using new financial technologies and mechanisms, we have decided to share a part of our knowledge through this guidebook. If you are a forward-looking innovator, excited about improving your work and the work of your institution and partners, this guide can help.
The following document is divided into tips and questions for planning, launching and managing a crowdfunding campaign. Through four sections of this guide, we introduce you to all that you need to consider before launching a crowdfunding campaign and for a successful launch. In the third and fourth section, we have prepared useful tips for managing an ongoing crowdfunding campaign and wrapping up your campaign.
If you just need money – go elsewhere and don’t use crowdfunding. Use crowdfunding if you need to create awareness, initiate debate, build a community or attract funders. Crowdfunding is (not) only about the money, it is so much more! – UNDP AltFinLab