The story
Created by the General Assembly in 1966 to promote economic development, UNCDF officially was established as an "autonomous organization within the United Nations" with the purpose to "assist developing countries in the development of their economies by supplementing existing sources of capital assistance by means of grants and loans".
In 1973, the Governing Council reoriented UNCDF's activities towards "first and foremost the least developed among the developing countries" and it began focusing on the world's least developed countries in 1974.
For the next twenty years, UNCDF financed stand-alone capital infrastructure—roads, bridges, irrigation schemes—mostly in Africa. It received about $40 million in core funding per year and operated out of UNDP country offices.
In the mid-1990s, UNCDF began focusing on the role local governments could play in planning, financing, and maintaining capital investments. Promoting effective infrastructure investment and service delivery via decentralized public financial management has been UNCDF's mainstay ever since. UNCDF's other major area of expertise—microfinance—also dates to the mid-1990s, when many of its rural development projects had credit components.
UNCDF's resources remain modest compared to many multilateral organizations. However, it has developed a considerable track record of going where others do not, and then “leveraging in” larger sources of public and private capital. In the words of a 2008 assessment by the Government of Sweden, “UNCDF should be seen as a development actor that paves the way for others, rather than a financing mechanism.”
In 2013, UNCDF received the highest score in the SmartAid for Microfinance Index, a measure of overall effectiveness in microfinance.
From Wikipedia’s article on United Nations Capital Development Fund, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5