David Jackson, a British national, has over 30 years’ experience in local development. In the 1980s he worked in London local government on the plan for employment, affordable housing and open space along the River Thames, including the park that became the site of the London Eye. He spent the 1990s in Mozambique working for the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) where he designed and piloted a national system of local government finance for capital investment that was taken to scale by government.

Returning to the United Kingdom in 2001 he managed a consulting company supporting local development in over 10 African and Asian countries through governments, the World Bank and other clients. David rejoined the United Nations in 2006 as decentralisation advisor to the government of Indonesia and UNDP where he was instrumental in developing UN support to local government reforms in Aceh province following the Indian Ocean Tsunami and the Peace Agreement.

In 2009 he became head of UNCDF Asia and Pacific office where he designed the Local Climate Adaptive Living Facility, a global mechanism that enables local governments in the least developed countries to access climate finance for resilient investments. Recently, he has focused on the challenges of unlocking domestic capital markets for investments in local economic development.

In May 2013 he was appointed director of UNCDF’s local development finance practice in New York. This unit is UNCDF’s centre of excellence and innovative fund for local government finance and local economic development finance in the world’s 47 least developed countries. In this position he manages a portfolio of local development finance programmes focusing on fiscal decentralization, infrastructure development, climate resilience grants, municipal finance and private sector investments.