Insights

Country insights
and future directions

In 2024, political instability, conflicts, and compounded crises adversely affected development progress by exacerbating fragility and inequalities. This underscored the importance of anticipation, agility, and adaptation, as well as multisectoral interventions and systems transformation to address national development contexts.

Future trends: Transforming systems through multisectoral portfolios

Funding Windows flexible funding enabled to shift to dynamic, systems-oriented model grounded in experimentation, learning, and adaptive management, empowering country offices to respond more effectively to complex development challenges through real-time learning, cross-sector collaboration, and long-term systems transformation.

Case studies from Tunisia and the Karamoja borderlands region demonstrate this approach in practice and show how the FWs helped improve systems thinking, strengthen adaptive management, and promote cross-sector partnerships in context-relevant ways.

In Tunisia, the FWs support enabled the launch of a systems-oriented, area-based governance portfolio targeting socio-economic disparities in marginalized regions. Flexible funds enabled UNDP to convene ten institutional partners for joint planning, embedding a dedicated portfolio learning function that institutionalized foresight, adaptive management and real-time learning. This created a continuous intelligence loop across interventions that surfaced leverage points, risks, and emerging opportunities. Key intelligence generated revealed that participatory area-based governance improves government cross-sector coordination and joint diagnostics with communities informs policy dialogue and investment planning. Since 2023, the portfolio has mobilized $24 million in co-financing and influenced how institutions, partners, and local actors approach governance as a pathway to inclusive development. 

In the Karamoja borderlands region, across Uganda and Kenya, Funding Window resources identified climate shocks, conflict, and fragile markets as interconnected challenges requiring an area-based portfolio response. A community-led ‘sensemaking’ analysis suggested that investing in selected value chains could reduce community conflict, improve livelihoods, and enhance cross-border economic potential. Furthermore, a focus on bottom-up peacebuilding, infrastructure development, and insights around addressing land–water–agriculture linkages facilitated deeper engagement with local governments and new partnerships with the Life and Peace Institute. Infrastructure investments, such as the Moroto–Alale highway, are contributing to safer trade and mobility, while innovative land leasing arrangements between farmer groups and private landowners are addressing fragmented land ownership in regions like Amudat.

UNDP Flagship Initiatives: Future opportunities for greater impact

From single-country investments, the Funding Windows have evolved to support integrated, multi-country interventions driven by Flagships Initiatives that embed integrated programming, policy coherence, systems thinking and adaptive management into each investment.

Spotlight on innovation
Supporting public sector transformation
The Future Smart Flagship Initiative emerged as a transformative, multi-country flagship programme to modernize public sector service delivery with inclusive, digital, and adaptive governance. The Flagship Initiative is piloting the UNDP “3-i” governance strategy (innovation, inclusion and integrity) in Bhutan, Chad and Ethiopia and is aligned with the FutureGov High Impact Initiative, co-led by UN DESA and UNDP, as a global platform to advocate for public sector transformation and innovation. In Bhutan, a pioneering disability-inclusion pilot is underway, engaging local and national stakeholders to create the country’s first disability-friendly district, with potential for national scale-up. In Chad, the initiative is enhancing e-governance through South-South cooperation with Latin American experts, introducing SIGOB digital tools to enhance transparency and oversight under the Prime Minister’s Office. Across all three countries, FutureSmart fosters strategic partnerships with governments, civil society, and international institutions, while promoting cross-border knowledge exchange on disability inclusion, digital innovation, and gender-responsive governance.  In Ethiopia, FutureSmart Flagship Initiative complements a $70 million World Bank civil service reform programme by advancing digital tools such as “AI for Government” and e-grievance mechanisms that equip civil servants with user-centric design - ‘deep listening’ - methodologies and roll-out a “Women Digital Champions Programme” to address gender gaps in public administration.
Designing a Future for All: Building Inclusive Bhutan

This reform is not just about improving processes, it is about restoring public trust, empowering citizens and transforming governance to meet the needs of the 21st century… Through financial assistance, technical expertise and capacity building initiatives, UNDP has been a key partner in ensuring the reform is future-ready, technology-driven and people-centred…

Dr. Mekuria Haile, Federal Civil Service Commissioner of Ethiopia