As we enter the Decade of Action, achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires accelerating transformational change, driven by innovation, risk-taking, and partnerships. Modeling financial pathways that are inclusive of last mile communities will be a key ingredient to enable such change and ensure no one is left behind.

Accelerating SDG action has become even more urgent in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, which is reinforcing existing challenges and posing particularly grave risks to poor and vulnerable communities in the least developed countries (LDCs), including women, youth, informal workers, migrants, and smallholder farmers. The pandemic’s unprecedented impacts increase the risk that vulnerable communities in LDCs will be left behind.

The crisis highlights the critical role to be played by a range of financing solutions, including Official Development Assistance to leverage other forms of capital. Rapid international collective action to scale up the deployment of innovative financing approaches that create new pathways to reach last mile communities in LDCs will be critical to supporting resilient and sustainable local economic development.

The current international financial architecture does not favor local economic investment in LDCs, so UNCDF works to tackle this challenge. Committed to market development approaches that can transform how public and private finance flows to the last mile, UNCDF creates demonstration effects and viable models that crowd in other actors, and can be replicated and brought to scale.

The results we achieved in 2019 contributed to i) develop markets for inclusive digital finance and economy solutions that reach the poor; ii) build ecosystems and provide catalytic finance to support small SDG positive businesses; and iii) create transformative change that enables local governments to access capital to build stable, dynamic, and resilient local economies.

The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the valuable roles to be played by digital solutions, sub-national finance, and small business finance to support communities through the worst of the crisis and to emerge with strong foundations for recovery.

As we look ahead to 2021, when we will develop our next Strategic Framework and accompany the process to define the Fifth UN Conference on the LDCs, we reaffirm our commitment to support accelerated SDG action in the LDCs to assure that the next decade of action is more resilient to future shocks, more sustainable, and more inclusive of the last mile.

We thank our many public and private sector partners, notably our LDC government partners and donors who co-create innovation with us, take risks with us, and recommit with each initiative to the goal of leaving no one behind.