Financing Cities of Tomorrow Blending Investments to Advance Sdgs

Rapid urbanization is fueling cities’ infrastructure needs and a resilient, sustainable infrastructure network plays a crucial role in ensuring the continued economic growth of countries of the global south. However, there is currently a 3.2 trillion US$ annual global investment gap to realize infrastructure projects. Investing in cities requires collaborative efforts to fill such urban finance gap. While most infrastructure projects have been historically publicly financed, there is a significant underutilized global private capital available to invest in bankable infrastructure projects, especially those supporting the UN SDGs. The biggest challenge is supporting local governments in developing an attractive financial environment and solid feasible sustainable projects to attract investments.

The session brings together International development banks, the private sector and local governments to showcase possibilities of utilizing private capital for priority city investment projects to advance SDGs. The session showcases how private capital can blend with other investments to enable the development of city-priority projects and enhance their impact under a sustainable model. The session highlights the changing collaboration model between cities and development banks from financing projects to becoming a facilitator and a catalyst for mobilizing resources and finding development solutions within cities from across the globe.

The session aims to discuss how can local governments advance blended finance through asking the following four questions:

1. What kind of capacity building and technical aid are needed to support local governments in designing and developing feasible and sustainable projects.
2. How can we support cities in derisking and setting regulatory frameworks and conditions for an attractive financial environment.
3. How can we support marketing projects for global audiences and banks in search of investors
4. How to enable local governments to secure seed funding with the ultimate goal of securing long-term financing from external lending