LocationsBy Troels Mahieu-Sorensen, Blended Finance and Impact Investing Advisor, UNDP Resilience Hub for Africa
From Dialogue to Investment: What the Kenya Impact Finance Forum Tells Us About the Future of Resilience Financing
June 22, 2026
At the Kenya Impact Finance Forum 2026 in Nairobi, UNDP had the opportunity to engage alongside impact investors, blended finance practitioners, development finance institutions, guarantee facilities, and local enterprises from across the continent. It was one of those rare events where the conversations felt genuinely honest, and where the gap between ambition and action gets examined with some rigour.
The Forum offered a clearer sense of both the progress being made and the structural challenges that remain, and reinforced the conviction that UNDP has a distinctive, and still underutilised, role to play in bridging the two.
The honest diagnosis
The ambition in the room was not in short supply. Everyone agreed on the headline: the SDGs will not be financed through public grants alone. Africa needs private capital at scale. Impact investing and blended finance are the right instruments. The frameworks are increasingly sophisticated. The intent is genuine.
And yet the money is still not flowing at the pace or scale required.
The conversations at the Forum helped surface why. It is not primarily a technical problem. The instruments exist. The frameworks are there. The challenge is a structural combination of high perceived risk in fragile and frontier markets, limited investment-ready pipelines, fragmented ecosystems where programming actors and investment actors rarely speak the same language, and a persistent mismatch between the time horizons of development programming and the return expectations of private capital.
A particular focus of the discussion was on ecosystem coordination — the hard, relationship-intensive work of connecting the right actors around the right opportunities, building the market intelligence and trust that makes investment decisions possible in contexts where neither has historically existed.
Where public programming fits — differently than we thought
One of the most striking themes to emerge from the Forum was a growing recognition that public programming — UNDP's core business — is not simply a precondition for private investment. It is, when designed and positioned correctly, a de-risking instrument in its own right.
This is a subtle but important shift. The traditional framing positions public funding as the resource that fills the gap left by private capital. The emerging framing recognises that public programming, presence, and relationships can actively change the risk calculus for private investors — reducing information asymmetries, demonstrating market viability, building local institutional capacity, and creating the pipeline of investment-ready enterprises that financial institutions need to operate in fragile and underserved markets.
UNDP's comparative advantage in this new framing is considerable. We work in the countries and communities that private capital has historically avoided. We have long-standing relationships with governments, local enterprises, and civil society. We understand the political economy of the contexts in which we operate. And increasingly, through initiatives like RIFHA, we are learning to translate that presence and knowledge into structured investment opportunities.
Turning insight into architecture — the RIFHA approach
The RIFHA — Resilience Impact Facility for the Horn of Africa — is UNDP's attempt to operationalise this thinking at regional scale.
RIFHA is not a fund. It is not a guarantee mechanism. It is an ecosystem architecture — designed to align UNDP's resilience programming, development partner funding, guarantee instruments, and private investment around shared objectives across the Horn of Africa.
The architecture works through three interconnected layers. Catalytic grants from donors and development partners fund the platform and generate the market intelligence, investment-ready pipelines, and partnership infrastructure that the ecosystem needs. Guarantee facilities use that pipeline and ecosystem support to deploy risk-sharing instruments more effectively and at greater scale than they could independently. And financial institutions — from regional commercial banks to impact investors — access those de-risked pipelines to deploy capital into local MSMEs operating in resilience-critical sectors: agribusiness, renewable energy, water and sanitation, health, and digital financial services.
The early results from the Italian funded PISTA (Pipeline and Investment Structuring Technical Assistance) methodology — which RIFHA has been piloting across the FAO/UNDP SCALA programme in Djibouti and Somalia, the UNDP/UNCDF Cold Storage initiative in Kenya, and the UNICEF/UNDP water programme in Wajir County — suggest that this model can work in practice. UNDP programming, when paired with structured market intelligence and investment facilitation, does generate investable pipelines. And those pipelines do attract financial institution interest, as demonstrated by the confirmation of Shuraako Capital as RIFHA's first anchor financial institution partner.
The ambition is significant: USD 18.5 million in catalytic grant contributions catalysing up to USD 500 million in aligned private investment, supporting over 1,000 MSMEs and creating or sustaining more than 50,000 jobs across the Horn of Africa.
What comes next — a conversation worth having
On Wednesday, 24 June 2026, UNDP's Resilience Hub will convene the first RIFHA Resilience Investment Dialogue in Nairobi — a half-day, invitation-only ecosystem conversation bringing together approximately 30 senior representatives from donor governments, development finance institutions, guarantee facilities, financial institutions, and strategic partners.
The event is designed to do what the Kenya Impact Finance Forum does well, but with a sharper focus on the Horn of Africa and on practical partnership architecture. The discussion will centre on four questions that emerged as critical from the Forum and from our own experience building RIFHA:
Why has blended finance not yet scaled in fragile and conflict-affected markets — and what structural shifts would actually change that? How can public programming be more systematically converted into investment-ready pipelines for private capital? What does effective deployment of guarantees in crisis and frontier contexts actually require? And how do we build the resilience investment ecosystem that the Horn of Africa needs — including the regulatory conditions, Islamic finance instruments, and local capital market infrastructure that make it sustainable?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are the design questions for RIFHA and for the broader effort to make blended finance and impact investing work where they are most needed.
An invitation to the conversation
The Kenya Impact Finance Forum was a reminder that appetite for this kind of work is real and growing. The practitioners in that room are not waiting for permission or for perfect conditions — they are building, learning, and adapting in real time.
UNDP's role in that ecosystem is not to lead from the front, but to connect, convene, and create the conditions under which others can invest. RIFHA is our most concrete attempt to date to do that systematically, at scale, and across a region where the stakes are high and the need is urgent.
If you are working in the blended finance, impact investing, or resilience financing space in the Horn of Africa — or if your institution is exploring how to deploy capital more effectively in fragile and frontier markets — we would welcome the conversation.
The dialogue starts on 24 June. But the partnership work it represents has already begun.
