The world looks very different than in 2020 when UNDP designed its last Strategic Plan. The Covid pandemic is over, but poorer countries will take years to recover from the shock. Multilateral cooperation is tense or faltering, development financing is under pressure and even commitment to the SDGs is no longer universal.  

Yet we started designing the new Plan, in late 2024, with determined optimism. With the conviction that in tough times for development, UNDP’s mission to expand people’s choices for a fairer, more sustainable future, was more vital than ever. And that in an uncertain world, UNDP had to remain a reliable partner, whatever the future might bring. 

The advance of AI may be the biggest change since 2020. From a single mention in UNDP’s current Strategic Plan 2022-2025, AI now influences every aspect of development: how we plan, and what we plan for. Its speed and unpredictability are significant challenges to designing a four-year strategy with staying power.  

Yet AI is also a huge advantage, offering powerful new tools for us to make sense of this changing global landscape. AI tools enabled us to analyse vastly more information about UNDP’s value, strengths and opportunities, and to understand the different futures we might face, than we could have done manually. 

So, how does an organisation plan for the future in uncertain times? How did we design a strategy that would hold up amid rapid change? 

Three things helped: a robust evidence base, grounded in our partners’ future needs; using AI to help make sense of it all; and making the most of UNDP’s growing foresight capabilities. 
 

Data-driven, partner-led 

First, we invested greater effort than ever before in understanding what our partners want. UNDP staff held 580+ consultations with government, private sector and civil society in 116 countries. Open-ended questions produced reams of evidence of why partners value UNDP and where they want our support. An open debate among 500+ participants on our SparkBlue engagement platform, a roundtable with 100 civil society partners, and 2,070 responses to an all-staff survey added more perspectives.  

Alongside these consultations, we analysed data from UNDP country programmes and from the independent evaluation and mid-term review of our current Strategic Plan. Especially timely were an independent review of UNDP’s business model carried out by EY in 2024, and AidData's Listening to Leaders survey of 11,000 development partners in 147 countries. 

Put simply, UNDP had never consulted so widely, nor had this amount of high quality data to crunch, as the starting point for a multi-year corporate strategy. Add the opportunity of AI to make sense of it all, and this significantly strengthened the foundations of the strategy. 

Designing the strategy began, then, not from the current Strategic Plan framework, but from what we had learned from our partners: 

• The strategy had to set clear priorities, focus on UNDP’s distinctive strengths and leverage our comparative advantages – especially given the harsh financial landscape.
• UNDP’s value lies not in discrete sectors, but at the intersections. 39% of partners’ needs cut across sectors, for example in capacity development or public-private partnerships. This complemented what the evaluation had recognised: that UNDP’s systems approach was the most significant driver of structural transformation, and integrated solutions were its strength.
• UNDP’s broad mandate to work across the spectrum of human development, and our role as the UN system integrator, position us well to tackle these complex challenges. This finding aligned with our scene-setting Landscape Paper, showing the interconnections among global challenges like gender equality, cascading conflict, uneven progress on poverty and the value of nature. 

All this encouraged us to frame the strategy around fewer, integrated results, showing where UNDP makes a difference to people’s lives; and to focus more sharply on what the evidence shows UNDP does best: integrated development solutions that deliver systemic change.