The UNCDF Policy Accelerator is a digital finance policy advisory program. It helps countries turn digital finance policy ambition into investable, scale-ready outcomes that deepen financial systems and expand economic opportunity. By targeting the structural rules that govern digital markets - competition, digital public infrastructure, and consumer safeguards - the Accelerator advisory enables capital to reach the world’s most underserved economies.
Digital finance is central to UNCDF’s offer, unlocking investment in early-stage and last-mile markets to de-risk LDCs, SIDS, and fragile settings. Yet, in many countries, promising digital finance opportunities often stall because policy environments are fragmented, markets are concentrated, and institutional capacity is limited. The Policy Accelerator addresses these bottlenecks directly.
Working alongside central banks, ICT ministries, competition authorities, and national development banks, the Accelerator advises on policy solutions that expand entry for innovative providers, modernize digital public infrastructure, and build stable systems where consumers and investors can operate with confidence. This upstream work enables concessional capital deployed by UNCDF and others to reach markets that can absorb it, catalyze domestic finance, and eventually attract larger public and private investors.
The Policy Accelerator helps countries to:
Through a market-systems approach using public-private dialogue, capacity development, and research, the Accelerator embeds reforms that outlast project cycles. By integrating gender equality, climate resilience, and digital public infrastructure into policy advisory, it ensures capital flows to digital markets that work for women, MSMEs, and last-mile communities.
As part of UNCDF’s catalytic mandate, the Policy Accelerator makes digital finance investable. It turns policy into pipelines, rules into market confidence, and national ambition into capital flows that reach places conventional finance does not.
Find out how the Policy Accelerator creates the conditions for capital to flow into last-mile digital markets:
