Registration: https://bit.ly/InvestorConvening

Co-organizer: UNDP, AfDB

Language: English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, Japanese

Background

Financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires structural transformations within the global financial system, and within entities that own, manage or regulate financial flows and transactions. Fundamentally related to effective governance, financing the SDGs necessitates changes in the ways public and private actors interact with each other across the economic, social, political and environmental spheres.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), having a long track record of working in public finance and private sector development, and more recently in unlocking private capital for the SDGs, is well positioned within the UN system to advance financing for the SDGs. UNDP has seen a growing demand from partners to scale up its work around public finance, as well as private sector engagement, development, and finance issues. Corporations are increasingly seeking UNDP’s advisory services on their strategic alignment with the SDGs.

In order to address these demands, UNDP established the Sustainable Finance Hub (SFH) and its Africa chapter, the Africa Sustainable Finance Hub (ASFH), in 2019, aggregating UNDP's existing work and expertise on financing the SDGs. The SFH offers a comprehensive package of methods and tools in support of the organization’s SDG Integration offer to enable governments, the private sector and international financial institutions to accelerate financing for the SDGs. The SFH supports UNDP Country Offices (COs) across its Africa and Arab States regions, and partners on the African continent to engage the private sector towards accelerating finance for the SDGs in the context of the African Union (AU) Agenda 2063.

As a concrete offer to private investors seeking guidance on SDG-enabling opportunities and looking for insights into business and impact data, UNDP developed the SDG Investor Maps as a market intelligence tool that translates development needs into tangible investment opportunities. Produced locally by COs in partnership with Governments and other partners, the SDG Investor Maps follow a standardised 8-step methodology to identify Investment Opportunity Areas (IOAs) at the intersection of national development needs and policy priorities, with investment momentum at scale. 

In order to achieve tangible impact on the country level, UNDP works with Governments and other partners in providing operationalisation support for the SDG Investor Map, which serve as the foundation and entry point for originating an SDG investment project pipeline, accessing public and private capital for SDG investment, managing for impact, and supporting an enabling policy environment for SDG investment. UNDP also supports deep dive analysis into relevant sectors to identify the pipeline of investable projects and enterprises, and uses its complementary suite of SDG Impact Standards as a comprehensive framework for integrating the SDGs into organizations’ management decision making.

Objective

On the African continent, UNDP has to date completed SDG Investor Maps in Djibouti, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda. Additional significant SDG financing work takes place in other countries in the region, including in Egypt where UNDP supports the Government in developing an SDG Financing Strategy by advocating for an INGF. The 15 African SDG Investor Maps, including those pending completion, identify 245 investment opportunities. Across the countries, similar types of IOAs have been established that showcase overarching opportunities for investors around energy (solar, wind, biomass), agricultural crops and processing, education and training, housing, water and sanitation. 109 of the 245 African IOAs can be allocated to the green and blue economy, with a majority of green and blue IOAs in Djibouti, Gabon, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria and Tunisia.

It is against this background that UNDP proposes to hold an Africa Continental Investor Convening to showcase investment opportunities in the green and blue economy on the continent, including with their potential to drive regional integration, and engage with both domestic and international investors seeking to make contributions to realising SDG investment opportunities across Africa.