Summary

With less than a decade remaining to achieve the global development goals, sustainable development in the 21st century needs investment. The social, environmental, health, urban, and economic challenges left to overcome call for innovative financing mechanisms and financial solutions that create scalable and effective ways of channeling funds from private sources, financial markets, philanthropists, foundations, companies, and other sources to help solve pressing global development and humanitarian challenges.
These financing solutions can take a variety of forms across sectors and geographies, from bonds, insurance-linked securities, and impact investments to advanced market commitments. Over the last several years, philanthropy has championed the development of such innovative finance solutions that have been successful in enabling, accelerating, and harnessing private capital markets for public good.

To broaden opportunities for SDG impact projects for cities in emerging and developing countries to attract finance, UN-Habitat has established with partners a City Investment Facility (CIF). The objective of the Feasibility Fund is to increase access of cities in developing countries to effective, cost-efficient project preparation support that enables high impact SDG pipeline projects to reach financial close and thus be implemented.