Welcome to the career site of UNCDF at Impactpool!
The United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) is the UN’s capital investment agency for the world’s 48 least developed countries. It creates new opportunities for poor people and their communities by increasing access to microfinance and investment capital. UNCDF was founded by the General Assembly in 1966 to promote economic development and began focusing the world’s least developed countries in 1974.
UNCDF focuses on Africa and the poorest countries of Asia, with a special commitment to countries emerging from conflict or crisis. It provides seed capital – grants and loans – and technical support to help microfinance institutions reach more poor households and small businesses, and local governments finance the capital investments, such as water systems, feeder roads, schools, irrigation schemes, that will improve poor people's lives. 70 percent of its portfolio is in Africa, 50 is in percent in post-crisis countries.
UNCDF operates in two broad areas: Inclusive Finance and Local Development Finance. UNCDF has also begun work on catalyzing domestic finance for public-private-partnerships geared to stimulating economic growth at the local level.
UNCDF’s work on inclusive finance seeks to develop inclusive financial systems and ensure that a range of financial products is available to all segments of society, at a reasonable cost, and on a sustainable basis. UNCDF supports a wide range of providers (e.g. microfinance institutions, banks, cooperatives, money transfer companies) and a variety of financial products and services (e.g. savings, credit, insurance, payments, and remittances). UNCDF also supports newer delivery channels (e.g. mobile phone networks) that offer tremendous potential for scale
UNCDF’s work on local development finance aims at ensuring that people in all regions and locations benefit from growth. This means dealing with the specific local challenges of, for example, peri-urban areas and remote rural locations. It means re-investing domestic resources back into local economies and services through inter-alia, fiscal decentralization, climate finance and project finance. We focus our efforts towards strengthening public financial management and local revenue, improving the quality of public and private investments and promoting innovations at the local level.
UNCDF contributes to SDG 1 and SDG 17
By strengthening how finance works for poor people at the household, small enterprise, and local infrastructure levels, UNCDF contributes to SDG 1 on eradicating poverty with a focus on reaching the last mile and addressing exclusion and inequalities of access. At the same time, UNCDF deploys its capital finance mandate in line with SDG 17 on the means of implementation, to unlock public and private finance for the poor at the local level. By identifying those market segments where innovative financing models can have transformational impact in helping to reach the last mile, UNCDF contributes to a number of different SDGs and currently to 28 of 169 targets.
From now on, you will find featured UNCDF positions at UNjobfinder, update your UNjobfinder profile to stay alerted when featured UNCDF jobs are posted. Find information how to apply in the job advertisements. When sending your application, please indicate you found the opportunity at Impactpool.