The decade since the adoption of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals has seen meaningful progress in health and digital inclusion. HIV infections have fallen nearly 40%. Electricity now reaches 92% of people globally. Internet connectivity has doubled to 68%.
Those gains are the exceptions. With five years to go, the world is far off track to meet the SDGs. Just 18% of the 169 targets are on pace; an equal number have slid backward since 2015. Nearly half show insufficient progress.
The picture is bleakest for SDG No. 16, Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, which has exactly zero indicators that are on track to meet 2030 targets, a result of the rise in global conflict, attacks on free expression and widening discrimination. Indicators for all of those factors are worse than 2015 levels when the target was announced.
Bright spots: Renewable energy remains the fastest growing source of energy and access to safe drinking water has increased from 68% to 74% – even as critical water stress persists.
As progress toward the SDGs has stalled, so has the UN’s ability to fund them. The United Nations Development Program’s core funding is down by 40%, from $967 million in 2010 to $581 million last year. That represents just 12% of UNDP’s total budget. The rest is earmarked by donors for specific projects, limiting the agency’s flexibility. The funding crunch is projected to continue under the Trump administration, which has proposed cutting most US voluntary contributions to UN agencies in its 2026 budget request.
Rewiring systems
The UNDP has been forced to rethink how to sustain impact with less flexible resources. After what the UN itself calls a “forgotten decade,” the organization is trying to maximize impact from its shrinking resources. In its 2026-2029 action plan, the agency is prioritizing “integrated solutions that drive systems change,” in contrast to the project-by-project model that the organization has historically pursued.
“For us at UNDP, we’re less around the transactions and more around the systemic change that we need to put in place,” Tom Beloe, who took the helm of UNDP’s Sustainable Finance Hub last year, told ImpactAlpha.
What does this mean? The UNDP is going after the plumbing. It’s rewiring how finance ministries, central banks, corporations, and investors allocate capital by changing existing budgets or building platforms that pull bigger pools of capital into sustainable deals.
“Experience, performance analysis and evaluative evidence have shown that integrated approaches can generate impacts greater than discrete projects.” the UN stated in its recent evaluation of its 2022-2025 action plan.
For example, “Trillions of dollars are still going into fossil fuels,” Beloe said. “That’s the type of impact we’re trying to avoid. If we just focus on the positives of impact investment, we’re not going to fix the system.”
Between 2022 and 2024, the agency steered more than $870 billion toward projects that advance the SDGs, with a goal of reaching $1 trillion by year-end, according to a recent report. The interventions take different forms:
- In Thailand, UNDP worked with the country’s Securities and Exchange Commission to force alignment between the $559 billion stock exchange and SDG targets through a new sustainability reporting regime.
- In Bangladesh, climate budgeting baked into national accounts unlocked $1.4 billion from the International Monetary Fund, or IMF.
- In India’s Haryana state, UNDP designed budget tools that earmark about $3 billion annually for SDG-related programs.
- And in Cabo Verde, an open-data portal now tracks budgets, revenues, and debt against SDG targets, making public finance more transparent and accountable.
UNDP also works directly with major corporations and financial institutions. In Japan, it is helping Mizuho Financial Group hit its $700 billion sustainable finance target by 2030, by identifying impactful projects aligned with the SDGs.
In partnership with the International Monetary Fund, UNDP launched the SDG Impact Standards to help companies, investors, and bond issuers integrate the SDGs into governance, decision-making, and strategic planning.
“This is a standard that moves us beyond reporting frameworks to actual management system frameworks—governance, strategy-setting, oversight, accountability, investment selection criteria—the whole shebang,” Beloe said.
Pipeline development
Once standards are in place, UNDP works to build a pipeline of investable projects that align with the SDG initiatives.
In Italy, UNDP uses Environment Ministry grants to develop bankable projects for the Italian Climate Fund, managed by national development bank Cassa Depositi e Prestiti. The fund, in a way, is creating a pipeline for its own development bank.
“This will be the model of development cooperation of the future” Beloe says.
In Costa Rica, UNDP structured a pay-for-results deal backed by the Green Climate Fund that pays for verified forest protection results. Independent auditors check outcomes before UNDP releases funds to the country’s forest programs. The program moved $37 million in 18 months. When auditors spotted mapping gaps, those became binding requirements for the next payment.
Also in Latin America, UNDP recently teamed up with regional development banks to launch the “LAC Facility for Financing Resilient Human Development,” a platform that structures green bonds, climate insurance, and small business financing in emerging markets.
Earlier examples of this initiative include a €100 million Blue Bond issued by the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, or CAF, with UNDP as technical advisor, to finance coastal resilience and marine protection. In Ecuador, UNDP’s PROAmazonía program, supported by the Green Climate Fund and the Italian government, has helped create credit lines for sustainable, deforestation-free production that link forest conservation with rural livelihoods.
Digital transformation
UNDP’s 2026-2029 action plan made digital and artificial intelligence transformation one of three core focus areas, alongside sustainable finance and gender equality.
Through its DigitalX initiative, UNDP has rolled out nonprofit GiveDirectly’s MobileAid program in Bangladesh, Malawi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The system mines mobile phone data to pinpoint vulnerable households, and routes direct cash transfers their way.
The model — first stress-tested with Togo’s government — is proving out a theory: that machine learning can stretch thin social safety nets further. Early results suggest the targeting cuts both fraud and inefficiency, helping scarce public dollars reach more people who need them.The agency also supports digital public goods — open-source tech that can scale across countries. The Digital Cooperation Fund pools international funding for cross-border work on AI governance, digital rights, and shared infrastructure. The SDG AI Lab builds reusable AI tools that governments can deploy off-the-shelf, cutting development costs and building capacity to work with tech companies.
