LocationsUNDP Rome Centre 2025 in review: A year of getting things done
December 30, 2025
Creating innovative solutions might sound like the hardest part of mobilizing climate action on the ground, but turning solutions into tangible action is the real challenge.
Throughout 2025, UNDP Rome Centre focused on exactly that, bringing ideas into life. From expanding energy access to mobilizing climate finance, or supporting the next generation of climate leaders, our work centered on the question of how to help partners actually deliver this past year.
Photo: UNDP Rome Centre
Across Africa, the demand for clean energy solutions is growing faster than the capacity to finance and deliver them. In 2025, our Energy for Growth initiative focused on the unglamorous but essential early stages of project development, helping transform promising ideas and great beginnings into opportunities that investors will pay attention to.
Throughout 2025, Energy for Growth supported the origination of renewable energy projects across 10 African countries collectively covering a wide range of technologies, including solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, biomass, and e-mobility. Together, they require an estimated investment of more than US$3 billion, with a dozen of them already involved in active financial discussions with potential backers this past year. Although, Energy for Growth doesn't finance projects directly, it helps developers strengthen their concepts, refine their structures, and navigate the complex landscape of technical assistance facilities and financiers.
This catalytic approach showed clear results in the four projects that secured approximately $600,000 in technical assistance funding. By helping developers prepare strong applications and connect with the right facilities, the programme kept work moving that might otherwise have stalled.
Photo: UNDP Senegal
If Energy for Growth focuses on origination, PISTA focuses on the critical space where preparation meets finance. In 2025, PISTA continued to mature as a platform designed to make climate and energy projects investment ready while keeping social and environmental outcomes front and center.
This year, PISTA supported projects across multiple countries with roughly $7 million in technical assistance. This funding was channeled to strengthen project design, climate impact, gender inclusion, and environmental and social safeguards. It helped governments and developers engage more effectively with development finance institutions and private investors.
This process resulted in several PISTA-supported projects to secure confirmed financing during 2025, while others entered advanced discussions with potential backers. Across Africa and beyond, these engagements involved a growing network of partners, including the African Development Bank, European, African and international development finance institutions, and impact-oriented funds.
The Italian Climate Fund is currently one of PISTA's key financing partners, with Italy playing a central role in helping projects move from preparation to implementation. At the same time, PISTA deepened engagement with additional financiers, broadening the base of institutions involved in climate and energy investments. PISTA’s work gained significant recognition in 2025.
The programme was highlighted in the outcome document of the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development as a platform that multilateral development banks can leverage to scale private capital mobilization for climate-related projects. We hope this recognition reflects not just individual successes, but a model that is beginning to demonstrate how technical assistance, public finance, and private capital can work together deliberately.
Photo: Narai Chal. Solar Panels in Rwanda
While much of the Rome Centre's work sits at the intersection of finance and infrastructure, Youth4Climate reminds us that climate action is fundamentally about people and leadership. In 2025, Youth4Climate came full circle, returning to the global stage at pre-COP30 in Brazil after being launched at pre-COP26 in Milan.
By year's end, Youth4Climate had funded and mentored 150 youth-led projects across more than 59 countries, backed by $4 million in direct funding. The projects span renewable energy, food systems, nature-based solutions, climate justice, and sustainable cities, turning local ideas into measurable action, with half of them being led by young women.
This year, Youth4Climate also launched the Solutions Catalogue, showcasing youth led climate initiatives and their impacts, and Generation Trust, a documentary following what young people deliver when they are trusted with resources and responsibility.
UNDP Rome Centre's work continues to be shaped by partnerships that extend beyond traditional government-based cooperation. Strategic collaboration with LUISS University demonstrated how UNDP can work with academia to build skills, generate knowledge, and prepare the next generation of development professionals. We believe these partnerships create value by strengthening the broader ecosystem needed for sustained climate action.
At the same time, the Centre is actively engaged in partnering with the private sector. Businesses, investors, and innovators play a critical role in advancing our work, and mobilizing potential private capital, expertise, and innovation remains central to delivering solutions that can scale. Our ability to operate across energy, finance, and youth action in 2025 was made possible by sustained support from the Government of Italy, particularly the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security.
Through its partnership with UNDP, Italy has enabled the Centre to function as an innovative and effective international platform rather than a project base office. Platforms create continuity across programmes, allow lessons to travel between initiatives, and support long-term engagement with partners and financiers.
In 2025, Italy's support, helped anchor UNDP Rome Centre's work in areas that require patience and consistency: project preparation, financing readiness, and capacity building. Our partnership reflects a shared understanding that climate action requires more than short-term interventions; institutions that can stay with initiatives as they grow and help connect local needs with global capital and expertise.
Photo: Luiss Student visiting UNDP Rome Centre
As 2025 comes to a close, the picture that emerges from UNDP Rome Centre's work is more of a steady progress than one of quick wins. The year demonstrated that delivery in climate action is cumulative. Each project prepared, each financing discussion advanced, and each community supported adds broader momentum to it. Carrying that momentum into the next year will require continued partnership, disciplined preparation, and a willingness to focus on what it takes to turn commitments into results.
That is the work UNDP Rome Centre set out to do in 2025, and the work it will continue to build on in the years ahead.
