This is a critical moment for development.
Unknown two short years ago, COVID-19 has upended our world and exposed profound weaknesses in how we organize our societies. The recovery offers us a choice: go back to business as usual or build forward better and smarter.
With speed and agility, this opportunistic foe exploits every opening as it gallops across the globe, constantly adapting to outsmart our roadblocks. Fuelled in part by poverty, inequality and civil discord, it in turn feeds these social ills.
COVID-19 is showing us how our development progress can be erased if we don’t insure it against future risks. To beat the pandemic, we must be quicker and more agile than a virus. We must seize every opportunity and anticipate the unknown. And we need the same approach if we are to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement on climate change. In short, we need future-smart development.
UNDP’s new Strategic Plan is engineered to respond to this moment.
The Plan recognizes the complexity of the development landscape and the challenges we face as a global community. It sets out our vision for a future-smart UNDP, working with partners to create a world where people and planet thrive together.
More than a mantra, #FutureSmartUNDP is our benchmark for success in the future of development.
In 2022, UNDP begins a new chapter. Our Strategic Plan 2022-2025 provides the vision for how UNDP delivers programmes in the more than 170 countries and territories where we work but also how we work within the organization.
This vision challenges every UNDP staff member and partner to push boundaries, embrace new ideas and raise our aspirations. It invites all of us to act with ambition and scale. Only then can we bring about the kind of transformation this moment demands.
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To be an effective partner in transformative change, UNDP has to build a new culture: one that embraces complexity, actively manages risk, continually adapts and seeks to learn alongside delivering results.”
– UNDP Strategic Plan
In the next four years, UNDP will work with countries to make a difference for millions of people. We’re aiming to:
The Strategic Plan sets out a path to achieve these lofty goals. We’re helping countries go beyond solving immediate development challenges to achieve systemic change and better equip themselves to prevent and respond to crises.
Our approach is based on human rights, empowerment, inclusion and equity to make sure no one is left behind.
Poverty and inequality
We’re investing in the enhanced capabilities people need to move above the poverty line and keep moving forward.
In practice
Governance
Building effective, inclusive and accountable governance is critical for countries to achieve transformational change and keep from sliding back.
Resilience
We help countries and communities build resilience to a wide range of shocks and crises, including conflict, the climate emergency, disasters and epidemics.
Environment
We help governments protect, manage and value their natural assets.
Energy
We work to expand energy access while accelerating the transition to renewables.
Gender equality
We’re working to strengthen women’s economic empowerment, participation and leadership and to remove obstacles to equality.
“In an uncertain world, its business model must empower UNDP to respond to partners with the flexibility and at the scale they expect.”
- UNDP Strategic Plan
Strategic innovation
To enhance the performance of entire systems, we help make them adaptive and resilient.
Our Mayors for Growth initiative is supporting 300 cities as they embark on strategic planning in uncertainty.
Digitalization
We support countries in building inclusive, ethical and sustainable digital societies.
Development finance
We partner with governments and the private sector to align capital flows with the SDGs and climate action.
“The challenge of the next four years is to accelerate and scale up development results significantly, bringing the Goals back within reach.”
This is a critical time for sustainable development – and for the world.
The actions we take today will shape the world we live in for generations to come. Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in the next eight years won’t be easy. But it’s the only way to rebuild a stronger, more sustainable global economy that leaves no one behind.
UNDP is prepared to confront the complexity of the moment.
Together with our government partners and allies within the UN system and beyond, we’re bringing local expertise and global perspective together to design and deliver solutions calibrated to place and time. This is future-smart development that creates impact that can withstand setbacks, from pandemics to natural hazards and humanmade disasters.
UNDP is focused on the future. Because it’s already here.
“#FutureSmartUNDP is leveraging the extraordinary power of innovation, digitalization and finance to drive the future of development. Working with countries and communities, we are co-creating a more inclusive and sustainable future for this generation – and the many generations to come."
– Achim Steiner, UNDP Administrator
© 2026 United Nations Development Programme
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