Good morning, attendees. Let me welcome all of you to the first of two sessions that comprise UNCDF’s Capstone Event on the sidelines of the 76^th session of the UN General Assembly. Before I commence today’s session, let me take a moment to promote Day 2 of our Capstone Event—our inaugural Sovereign Borrowers Conference--which will take place tomorrow, starting at 8:30am New York time.

The Sovereign Borrowers Conference will be an important and impactful convening focused on the challenges faced by developing countries and LDCs borrowing in capital markets. We have a robust agenda and a powerful lineup of speakers so I hope all of you register and attend.

Today, I am so proud and pleased to welcome all of you to this morning’s Investment Solutions Conference—Day 1 of UNCDF’s Capstone Event coinciding with this year’s GA. Today’s conference comes at a pivotal point in time for the UN Capital Development Fund, which I am pleased and proud to lead as Executive Secretary. Today’s event comes just days after we have submitted our Strategic Framework to our Executive Board, which represents the strategic path for this organization for the next four years.

As we stated in our Strategic Framework, UNCDF’s vision is to “Leverage the development impact of capital to strengthen the sustainable growth and inclusiveness of LDC economies to enable them to achieve the SDGs.” And to that point, the mission of UNCDF—the means by which we will look to achieve this vision—is to “Serve as the UN flagship catalytic financing agency for the LDCs to strengthen financing mechanisms and systems for structural transformation.”

But UNCDF’s vision and mission cannot be divorced from this juncture we find ourselves in regarding development finance in general and achievement of the SDG agenda in last mile markets in particular. The Decade of Action to achieve the SDGs began with an unprecedented health and socio- economic crisis that could push as many as one third of all those living in LDCs back into poverty—a crisis so dire that the Decade of Action for the implementation of the SDGs could instead become, in fact, the decade of lost development. That is, unless we innovate, pilot and deploy investment solutions that will catalyze the flows of capital necessary to achieve sustainable growth and inclusiveness in the LDCs.

This leads us to today’s Investment Solutions Conference. Over the course of the next couple of hours, we will provide you with an overview of investment solutions to support SDG investments in last mile markets. Specifically, after today, we hope that you will get a strong sense of investment solutions that are currently being deployed, as well as investment solutions that are under development.

Additionally, we are using today’s conference to highlight several investment solutions that emphasize UNCDF’s innovation capital, all of which touch on a variety of essential sectors to drive SDG achievement: from matchmaking and capitalization of SMEs to advisory services that help create fiscal space for municipal governments; from performance metrics that measure digital inclusiveness to blended finance vehicles that catalyze commercial finance for SMEs, financial service providers and local infrastructure projects.

We will also have the opportunity to hear from an enterprising business leader who is the founder—Ms. Chirwa—of a food processing company in Rwanda that also supports women’s economic empowerment. Besides presenting an example of how we partner and support promising companies with commercial and development potential, hearing from Ms. Chirwa will be a reminder that there are bankable businesses in LDC markets that should be on the radar of development finance institutions and institutional investors.

Ultimately, we want today’s conference to serve as a platform for the scaling up of effective targeted approaches to mobilize capital and investment solutions across the LDCs, as well as to convene stakeholders in catalyzing important—and often overlooked—challenges and solutions related to the position of the LDCs within the global financial architecture and their financing challenges.

Before we proceed, I want to acknowledge one point about the development challenge that unites all of us today. Achieving the SDGs and to deliver sustainable development to the last mile will require the best innovations and innovators from the spaces of both economic development and investment finance. On this particular point, while I have already shared UNCDF’s vision and mission, I would like to close by sharing UNCDF’s ambition.

Looking to the future, UNCDF will realize its full potential as a hybrid development agency and development finance institution. UNCDF will achieve this by fully realizing its overall financing mandate with capital deployment, financial advisory and capital catalyzation. This will be matched with development expertise across five flagship areas: in the well-established work on inclusive digital economies and local transformative finance, and in the emerging areas of women’s economic empowerment; climate, energy, and biodiversity finance; and sustainable food systems finance.

As the leader of UNCDF, my hope is that our vision, mission and aspiration all reflect a powerful point: that capital exists to support humanity, not the other way around. We know that all of the actors in the global financial architecture are looking for the ideas, tools and projects that will help unlock the true development potential of capital. Our capstone event today and tomorrow will hopefully extend the message that UNCDF is ready to take on this essential leadership role. Thank you and welcome. And with that I will turn it over to my colleague, Barbara Samuels, Executive Director of the Global Clearinghouse for Development Finance.