Capital Musings

The SDG of the month for February is SDG 11—to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. So, we invited Jaffer Machano, Global Programme Manager for UNCDF’s Municipal Finance Programme, back to the podcast. Jaffer was our guest for Episode 3, where he laid out the challenges that cities, towns and local governments face in terms of accessing the necessary capita...

Those in the sustainable development space know that every year, the gap between SDG financing needs and available capital runs in the trillions--$2 trillion according to a conservative estimate. At the same time, the conversations surrounding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) often includes the phrase "billions to trillions"--representing the point that in order to achieve the SDG agenda,...

Choosing between living under the authority of a leviathan and a life that would be “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” was the centerpiece of Thomas Hobbes’ social contract theory. But how much of a leviathan do we need to ensure that we can live both peacefully and freely? More to the point, how capable do we want a government to be? If every government runs the risk of either being so “capable,”...

Over 70 million people have been displaced due to conflict, persecution or war. When we think of those who have been forcibly displaced—whether they are refugees, asylum seekers or internally displaced people—we often think of their lack of footing within their home or country. But we rarely think about how they contend with financial exclusion. How can displaced populations cultivate a financial...

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres opened this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference—or COP25—by issuing the warning that “the point of no-return is no longer over the horizon.” This follows the release of the UN Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap report, which stated that we are on the brink of missing the opportunity to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But do these ci...

If you were asked "what is the difference between women's economic empowerment and women's economic development," would you know the answer? Women's economic empowerment has been an essential driver of the economic development agenda; uniting individual nations, multilateral organizations, NGOs and impact investors. But what does successful women's economic empowerment truly mean, particularly in...

The city of Los Angeles, with a population of roughly 4 million people, can issue a bond to fund infrastructure construction. Yet, the city of Nairobi—the capital city of Kenya with a population of roughly 3.5 million people—is effectively, if not actually, unable to do the same. Despite the global trend of urbanization, cities and local governments in developing countries experience tremendous di...

Blended finance is seen as a tool that can unlock investment capital for projects in the world’s most challenging markets, notably in the least developed countries. So why is only 6% of blended finance, in the form of private capital mobilized by official development assistance, reaching these markets? That is the finding of a report recently released by UNCDF and the OECD. On Episode 2 of Capital...

In the inaugural episode of Capital Musings, Esther Pan Sloane, Head of Partnerships, Policy and Communications for UNCDF, addresses a critical question in the area of sustainable development: with a global financial ecosystem that possesses abundant levels of capital, why is much of that capital not reaching the least-developed countries in the world where it is needed the most? Esther also discu...