The ReStart Fund is a joint UNDP–UNCDF global financing platform designed to support early recovery and economic resilience in fragile and crisis affected contexts.
ReStart mobilizes and deploys catalytic financial instruments, including grants, concessional loans, and guarantees, alongside targeted technical assistance to help MSMEs, financial institutions, and local economic systems recover after crisis. A defining feature is the integration of financing and technical assistance as a single package. In crisis contexts, liquidity alone is insufficient. Businesses and financial institutions also need support to manage risk, rebuild balance sheets, improve investment readiness, and adapt to disrupted markets. By combining capital with technical assistance, ReStart ensures resources are used productively, reach intended beneficiaries, and support sustainable recovery rather than short term relief.
ReStart operates through country and regional windows, ensuring interventions are country led, context specific, and locally anchored, while benefiting from a global platform that pools risk, expertise, and donor resources.
ReStart Fund in action
ReStart is already operational through country windows, demonstrating how integrated finance and technical assistance work across crisis contexts.
Syria: After more than a decade of conflict, Syria’s financial system faces severe liquidity constraints, high risk aversion, and limited access to credit. MSMEs, especially women led and rural enterprises, remain largely excluded despite their role in employment and recovery. The Syria window combines guarantees and concessional liquidity for financial institutions with technical assistance to strengthen MSME investment readiness and market linkages. It supports responsible lending, prioritizing women’s economic empowerment, local value chains, and early recovery sectors.
Jamaica: Climate related shocks have disrupted MSMEs, destroyed assets, and reduced access to working capital. The Jamaica window provides rapid recovery support alongside technical assistance to restore operations, rebuild balance sheets, and improve investment readiness. It acts as a bridge from emergency grants to follow on financing, gradually reducing risk and expanding lending, with a focus on job preservation, women led enterprises, and resilience.
State of Palestine / Gaza: Prolonged conflict and repeated shocks have constrained financial systems and reduced lending to MSMEs. In the West Bank, ReStart deploys guarantees, risk sharing instruments, and technical assistance to stabilize balance sheets and sustain lending. In Gaza, interventions are sequenced and aligned with UNDP’s Income and Market Activation for Recovery approach, focusing on restoring financial system functionality so that recovery and reconstruction finance can flow through regulated channels.
How the ReStart Fund works
ReStart addresses high risk environments and fragmented interventions through deliberate sequencing:
Diagnostics, investment facilitation, and policy analysis ensure capital reaches viable actors and priority sectors, reducing risk and improving targeting.
Grants, concessional finance, and risk sharing instruments are deployed rapidly, within 21 days of a crisis, to stabilize MSMEs, preserve jobs, and restore lending capacity. Technical assistance ensures effective use of capital.
Post financing support strengthens repayment capacity, improves portfolio management, and builds pipelines of bankable investments, enabling a transition toward blended and commercial finance.
Key components
Together, UNDP and UNCDF combine systems building with market-based solutions:
- Grants Funding Window (UNDP):
Supports diagnostics, crisis response, MSME capacity building, pipeline development, policy reform, and digital public infrastructure. - Blended Finance Window (UNCDF):
Provides catalytic capital and derisking instruments, including concessional loans, guarantees, credit enhancements, and risk sharing tools to mobilize investment and restore financial sector functioning.
Ambition
The ReStart Fund aims to mobilize $20 million in initial capitalization, using public resources to catalyse additional domestic and international investment.
