LocationsEvaluating UNDP's Strategic Plan 2022-2025
The pursuit of transformational change
The UNDP Strategic Plan 2022-2025 was designed to respond to a world facing growing inequality, climate crises, geopolitical tensions and vulnerabilities worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Declining official development assistance and intensified competition among development actors further underscored the urgency of UNDP defining its role clearly and demonstrating coherence, particularly in the context of the United Nations Development System reform.
The independent evaluation of the Strategic Plan focused on the most significant changes UNDP promoted during this period and assessed the Plan’s influence on UNDP programmes and operations. The evaluation drew insights from over 700 individuals through interviews, surveys, and focus groups. It also reviewed nearly 1,500 evaluations, analyzed 188 UNDP publications using web-scraping tools, and conducted a Comparator Study to assess UNDP’s strategic positioning against peer organizations.
A culture shift towards integrated solutions
The evaluation found growing understanding and adoption of integrated solutions across UNDP. This shift led to more programmes that combined inclusive, green, and digital approaches to address development challenges, crises, and shocks. Key examples include:
Inclusive and green transitions: UNDP made meaningful progress integrating biodiversity conservation into national planning and promoting inclusive, nature-based solutions that supported marginalized communities. It expanded access to fair, inclusive and equitable renewable energy and played a key role in advancing climate security plans - fostering a more coordinated approach to addressing environmental and climate threats while caring for inclusion of the most vulnerable.
Digitalization: Digital approaches and tools proved to be powerful enablers and accelerators across sectors. UNDP helped expand access to digital services that strengthened government efficiency, improved healthcare delivery, and unlocked new opportunities for more inclusive digital economies.
Resilience building: UNDP resilience efforts extended beyond fragile settings, encompassing conflict reduction and social cohesion, health, climate change, natural disasters and economic shocks. These more integrated approaches better balanced urgent needs with long-term objectives. UNDP stayed and delivered, maintaining its operations in the most difficult environments. Its presence fostered trust, allowing the organization to link humanitarian response with long-term development goals through the Humanitarian-Development-Peace nexus.
Leaving No One Behind (LNOB): UNDP not only expanded access to services for those at risk of exclusion but also deepened its understanding of intersectionality - recognizing how different forms of vulnerability require integrated, holistic approaches. However, momentum around LNOB slowed due to gaps in governance, accountability, and incentives.
Despite this progress, delivering on more complex, integrated solutions often strained UNDP’s capacity.
Enablers of change fostered learning and futures thinking
The Strategic Enablers fostered a culture of experimentation and learning, exemplified by the Accelerator Labs, which encouraged teams to test ideas, adapt quickly, and learn from experience—leveraging UNDP’s strengths while creating space for innovation and future-ready solutions.
The Enablers also helped UNDP remain relevant in a fast-changing development landscape. In the digital space, for example, UNDP carved out a strong role for itself, guided by a global digital strategy and country-level readiness assessments, building on its governance expertise and strong relationship with governments.
Sustainable finance emerged not only as an area of growing importance, but increasingly as a collaborative advantage for UNDP. UNDP helped countries mobilize new resources and shape policy dialogues—nationally and globally—on the urgency of SDG financing.
However, the promotion of the Enablers was not without challenges. These included limited integration of the Accelerator Labs into country offices and programmes, inconsistent funding, difficulties in scaling results, and obstacles in applying systems thinking through portfolio approaches, despite some notable successes.
Strategic Enablers
Innovation
Digitalization
Sustainable Finance
Declining flexible funding limited more mission-driven results
UNDP’s funding model remained a key challenge.
A growing dependence on earmarked, non-core resources limited UNDP’s strategic flexibility. This reliance on non-core funding continued to constrain UNDP’s ability to take long-term, transformative approaches and adapt to fast-changing needs.
Although $25.7 billion was budgeted for 2022–2024—surpassing projections by almost $4 billion—only $1.8 billion of this was flexible core funding, falling short of the $3 billion envisioned in the Strategic Plan.
Governance stood out as UNDP’s distinctive strength
The evaluation highlighted three core assets that continue to position UNDP as a vital development partner:
- its global presence;
- its broad mandate allowing flexibility to respond to partners’ needs;
- and its valued expertise in governance.
While governance remains UNDP’s most recognized strength, the organization’s value proposition in this area became less clear as new priorities emerged. As UNDP expanded into new areas, its core identity—particularly its leadership in governance—became less clearly defined in the eyes of partners, leaving the organization more vulnerable in an increasingly competitive development landscape.
Recommendations for UNDP
While democratic governance remains vital, limited political will and funding require a flexible approach. The rise in government cost-sharing reflects growing demand for effective governance—UNDP should leverage its expertise to strengthen public institutions, promote human development and rights, and advance inclusive, sustainable governance.
Make them more practical and better resourced with the right tools, skills and incentives.
Clarify UNDP’s value proposition and align resources to strategic priorities, expanding flexible funding windows.
Enhance technical expertise, especially at country level, to better support countries in leveraging sustainable development finance, including private capital.
Pay particular attention to transnational issues.
Establish accountability structures, dedicated budget and enhanced capabilities for intersectional analysis.
Reinforce innovation, digitalization, and sustainable finance as drivers of development acceleration, with a focus on learning for system change.
Improve coherence, efficiency, and effectiveness of UNDP operations in line with the mindset of clustering operational services and centralizing cost recovery.
Focus on impact beyond accountability to foster continuous learning, accelerate the SDGs, and deepen human development. Consider extending the cycle of the next Strategic Plan to 8 or 10 years to allow for more meaningful impact measurement.
