The Global Fund for Cities’ Development is an association under French law (loi 1901). It is a membership organization. Members pay a fee and elect the Board of Directors. The current Board of Directors was elected in November 2019 in Durban. The Board’s Co-Presidents are the City of Paris and the District of Abidjan. As a multi-stakeholder global network, the Fund has worked since its creation with more than 1,500 cities and regions in one hundred countries, as well as with five hundred companies and investors and sixty sub-national development banks.
PRINCIPAL OBJECTIVES
The Fund is a global network of cities and regions that focuses on developing and promoting investment and financing solutions for sustainable urbanization as a transformative lever to achieve global goals.
The Fund is both a network and an incubator of operational strategies. It supports public actors through technical assistance and financial engineering across the entire value chain of urban development financing. It develops and facilitates partnerships with all actors involved in local development financing, promoting a multi-stakeholder approach.
The Fund mobilizes the expertise of practitioners to support transfer of knowledge and peer-to-peer cooperation on topics such as financial decentralization, financial intermediation, climate finance and innovative financing methods.
“The strategic role of local governments in achieving global agendas is unanimously recognized. Yet, the financing of cities and regions is characterized by market failure. There is a gap between the supply and demand sides of financing. Although governments and both technical and financial development partners have deployed numerous credit lines and financial instruments to prepare, invest in or provide guarantee to urban projects, local governments still lack access to resources to adequately deliver urban services and meet the SDGs. They encounter difficulties in their ability to match the requirements of financial actors or are limited by inadequate institutional frameworks.
It is within this context that FMDV plays a major role. Its unique network of local and regional governments, dedicated to issues of local finance, develops solutions to support the entire value chain of urban development financing.”
MR ROBERT BEUGRÉ MAMBÉ, MINISTER GOVERNOR, DISTRICT OF ABIDJAN,
CO-PRESIDENT OF THE GLOBAL FUND FOR CITIES’ DEVELOPMENT
KEY PROJECTS
The Fund carries out its activities on three operational axes, across international, regional, national, and local levels of intervention.
• Advisory missions to public partners. The Fund supports programmes at national and local level to improve partners’ circumstances and capacity to access finance and investments for an integrated urban transition.
• Multi-stakeholder dialogues and partnerships to accelerate action. The Fund coordinates sectoral alliances; provides training in urban finance; offers project coaching to help project leaders reach bankability; holds match-making sessions to connect investment demand and supply; and develops ‘living labs’ to test urban innovation proposals and prepare for their scale-up phase, etc.
• International advocacy and knowledge production. The Fund is particularly involved in structuring the Local Finance Knowledge Hub, a unique platform dedicated to local finance.
Through these activities, the Fund supports development programmes valued at USD 35 million and has helped to mobilize more than USD 1 billion for local development.
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