This initiative is supported through a grant from UNDP Innovation Facility funded by the Government of Denmark, and implemented in partnership with the Canada-UNDP Climate Change Adaptation Facility (CCAF) funded by the Government of Canada.

In June 2014 UNDP and the Government of Denmark signed a cost sharing agreement establishing the UNDP Innovation Facility, a global mechanism to support innovation for development – effectively the “home” of UNDP’s drive to innovate systematically. The Facility is designed to offer the organization and its collaborators across the globe with technical and financial support to explore and try new approaches to increasingly complex development challenges. This support includes:

  • seed funding for R&D, scanning and finding breakthroughs, building and testing prototypes of novel interventions;
  • platforms and incentives for sharing and communicating throughout the innovation process, for exchanging experiences, and learning across countries and regions;
  • resources to support innovation, such as a network of innovation colleagues at HQ and in the regions, a roster of experts in a number of high-demand specialized fields, and a set of templates and field-tested processes for staff learning and development.

The UNDP-Canada Climate Change Adaptation Facility (CCAF), established by Canada in partnership with UNDP, aims to strengthen climate-resilient approaches to agriculture and water management, with an emphasis on gender-responsive approaches.  The CCAF incorporates national projects in Cambodia, Cabo Verde, Haiti, Mali, Niger, and Sudan, that scale up or extend projects previously supported by the Global Environment Facility’s Least Developed Countries Fund (GEF/LDCF).  In addition, the global component of the CCAF aims to collect and analyze information, experiences, and lessons learned emanating from the six national projects to produce and disseminate knowledge that can be shared between the countries and usefully applied in other contexts.  The CCAF also helps to broadly inform climate and sustainable development policies at the local, national and global levels, while promoting global exchange of information, experiences, and lessons learned.