FINANCE YOUR CITIES
COUNTRY PLATFORMS
FOR LOCALIZING FINANCE
THE FYC COUNTRY PLATFORM FOR LOCALIZING FINANCE: A TRANSFORMATIVE APPROACH ROOTED IN COUNTRY LEADERSHIP
The Finance Your Cities (FYC) Country Platforms are a strategic and operational response to one of the greatest challenges of our time: bridging the gap between local investment needs and available finance, in a context of rapid urbanization, climate vulnerability and systemic underfunding of local and regional governments.
These Country Platforms are nationally-led, locally-anchored, and finance-oriented mechanisms designed to structure, coordinate and scale up financial solutions for local development and resilience. They embody a new generation of development instruments aligned with the global agenda on financing for development (FfD), climate action, and territorial cohesion.
A Unique Institutional and Financial Proposition – Africa Leading The Way
Initiated in Africa — starting with Cameroon and Madagascar — these platforms are built on over a decade of strategic advocacy and technical innovation led by FMDV and its partners. They reflect a shift in global consensus: localizing finance is now a shared priority among development partners, as recently acknowledged in the Compromiso de Sevilla of the UN FfD4 Conference.
Country Platforms are not generic coordination frameworks — they are strategic vehicles for transformation, able to channel large-scale public and private investment into locally-driven, financeable and/or bankable and impactful projects. They aim to unlock the full potential of subnational actors while aligning with national development plans, climate commitments (NDCs, NAPs), and macroeconomic reforms.
TEN GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR TRANSFORMATIVE COUNTRY PLATFORMS
1. Country-led and Country-owned
Platforms must be led at the highest political level, aligned with national strategies, and designed as sovereign instruments of transformation.
2. Strategic and Prioritized
Platforms must articulate a clear, long-term vision — linked to inclusive, low-carbon, resilient development — with a focused set of investment and reform priorities.
3. Inclusive and Locally Anchored
Platforms must actively involve local and regional governments, civil society, the private sector and communities from the outset, ensuring multi-level governance and strong territorial ownership.
4. Integrated and Cross-sectoral
Platforms should foster synergies across sectors (urban development, infrastructure, nature, economy, social inclusion), breaking institutional silos and aligning public policies with financial tools.
5. Dual-speed and Deliverable
Platforms must deliver visible results quickly while also driving systemic transformation over time — balancing “quick wins” and structural reforms in a pragmatic, sequenced approach.
6. Results-oriented and Measurable
Platforms must establish clear impact pathways, measurable indicators, and transparent monitoring frameworks to guide resource allocation and track transformative outcomes.
7. Finance-aligned and Leverage-driven
Platforms must include a credible financial strategy that optimizes concessional resources, blends public and private finance, and leverages domestic and external funding.
8. Adaptable and Resilient
Platforms must remain agile and responsive to changing contexts, with built-in learning loops and the ability to adjust investment priorities and institutional mechanisms.
9. Capacity-building and Institution-strengthening
Platforms must integrate long-term technical assistance and capacity development, empowering national and subnational institutions to structure, implement and monitor investments.
10. Transparent and Accountable
Platforms must embed robust governance and reporting systems, ensuring mutual accountability between government actors, development partners, and national stakeholders.
OPERATIONALIZATION: THREE STRATEGIC PILLARS FOR LOCALIZING FINANCE AT SCALE
The Finance Your Cities Country Platforms are not technical assistance programs — they are country-owned systems engineering mechanisms designed to localize, structure and scale up public and private investment flows towards subnational territories, in all their diversity.
To translate national ambition into operational delivery, each platform is deployed through three interconnected and sequenced pillars, designed to work within the institutional fabric and fiscal realities of each country. These pillars offer a pragmatic roadmap to move from policy intention to financial transactions and measurable impact.
This pillar addresses the root problem behind fragmented territorial financing: the absence of a coherent national framework to govern how resources flow to and are managed by local and regional governments and their facilities. It focuses on building a multi-level and multi-actor dialogue space where national authorities, local and regional governments associations, sector ministries, public financial institutions, and development partners can co-design a national strategy for localizing finance.
Key deliverables include:
- Establishing structured policy dialogues at national level to identify blockages, set shared objectives, and align institutional mandates around territorial investment (in parallel to ongoing and in-place fiscal decentralization processes).
- Drafting or consolidating a National Strategy and Roadmap for Localizing Financing, serving as a reference for all actors. This document articulates objectives, sequencing, instruments, and governance arrangements to unlock, direct, and monitor dedicated funding flows to local and regional governments, their associations, SDBs and sector ministries, aligned with the SDGs, Paris Agreement and FfD commitments.
- Coordinating international partners and DFIs to prevent redundancy, promote complementarity, and ensure that external support strengthens national systems instead of bypassing them.
This component sets the regulatory and institutional infrastructure for a more predictable, scalable, and equitable localization of finance.
Once the enabling environment is defined, this second pillar aims to equip institutions at all levels with the capacity to implement, manage, and benefit from the new financing architecture and its opportunities. It goes beyond training to focus on building systemic capabilities, targeting both upstream (national frameworks and institutions) and downstream (local and regional governments, project owners, public intermediaries).
Activities include:
- Designing and deploying capacity-building programs tailored to the country’s fiscal and institutional ecosystem: thematic masterclasses, peer exchanges, internationalization, coaching of project units, diagnostic reviews.
- Supporting the operationalization of local investment planning frameworks, including prioritization criteria, and pipeline development processes — tested in pilot territories with potential for replication.
- Strengthening Subnational Development Banks (SDBs), intergovernmental funds and decentralized agencies/facilities to become proactive financial partners, with expanded service offers and better risk management capabilities.
- Establishing permanent technical assistance units (FinHubs) hosted in ministries, NDBs, or local and regional government associations, with high-level financial expertise to provide structured, long-term support to local and regional governments.
- Developing digital tools for budgeting, and reporting, enabling governments to measure and communicate the contribution of local investments to national and global commitments.
This pillar ensures that localizing finance is not only desirable, but feasible, by investing in the long-term institutional infrastructure needed to operationalize reforms.
This third pillar addresses the core bottleneck faced by most territories: the inability to move from identified needs to viable, financeable and/or bankable projects.
It focuses on preparing and structuring investment opportunities, starting with a selected group of territories and projects to demonstrate viability and attract financing.
Key activities include:
- Selection and prioritization of projects in partnership with national and subnational authorities, based on strategic value, readiness, and catalytic potential.
- Deployment of technical assistance to bring projects to maturity, including prefeasibility analysis, structuring of revenue models, risk allocation mechanisms, and alignment with financiers’ requirements.
- Organization of Investment Forums and Matchmaking Platforms to connect project owners with DFIs, commercial lenders, donors and investors — facilitating structured dialogue and financial negotiations.
- Testing of innovative solutions through small-scale pilots (“investment labs”) to validate technical, economic, and governance models before scaling.
This component is the bridge between policy and market, turning public ambition into financially structured, investable pipelines — and ultimately into financed projects.
Together, these three pillars form a coherent, real economy–oriented operational system, capable of anchoring local and regional governments within national financing strategies and international investment flows.
They are strategic in vision, modular in execution, and grounded in fiscal realism — because localizing finance is not just about mobilizing resources, it’s about engineering confidence, performance, and institutional credibility.
TANGIBLE BENEFITS FOR STAKEHOLDERS
The FYC Country Platforms offer a unique value proposition and are designed to create win-win outcomes for each stakeholder
involved in the localization of finance.
Local & Regional Governments
→ Support visibility and institutional integration as first partners of the National Government, especially on the co- designing and deployment of the National Strategy on Localizing Finance, positioning themselves as pioneers;
→ Improve knowledge, autonomy and innovation in financial engineering and management;
→ Gain access to a wider array of financing mechanisms, technical assistance, and capacity-building opportunities to structure viable and/or bankable projects;
→ Catalyze investment in resilient and sustainable infrastructure.
National Associations of Cities & Regions
→ Strengthen their internationalization, institutional leadership and resources;
→ Build technical capacity to support their members in readiness and matchmaking processes;
→ Contribute to a unified voice advocating for subnational finance reforms and innovation; P2P learning and exchange on best practices and reforms.
National Governments
→ Provide access to additional resources to deliver on development priorities;
→ Align better between national plans and local development strategies and investments;
→ Enhance ambition and implementation opportunities for international commitments and national strategies;
→ Increasing international engagement and visibility;
→ Co-design and deploy a National Strategy on Localizing Finance, positioning themselves as frontrunners;
→ Benefit from improved coordination across tiers of government.
National and Subnational Development Banks
→ Play a central role in structuring the subnational finance architecture and new projects portfolio;
→ Develop bespoke and new financial instruments tailored to subnational needs and absorption capacities;
→ Position themselves as key territorial finance intermediaries and align with regional and multilateral development banks and private investors, depending on the context and market maturity;
→ Gain access to financing mechanisms, technical assistance, P2P exchanges and capacity-building opportunities.
Development Partners (MDBs, DFIs, UN agencies, Philanthropies)
→ Engage with a country-owned, demand-driven and structured ecosystem, allowing for scalable and traceable impact, efficient resource allocation, and clear alignment with global commitments;
→ A clear and strategic intervention framework led by national actors, aligning resources with local realities;
→ Structured multi-year interventions, promoting predictability, joint planning, and co-financing of large- scale initiatives;
→ Stronger localization of climate finance, enabling the practical implementation of global commitments (e.g., COP, FfD4, 2030 Agenda).
Private Sector Actors
→ Access project pipelines, benefit from de-risking instruments, and co-develop innovative public-private partnerships aligned with local priorities and climate-smart strategies;
→ Providing access to structured and aggregated projects that meet private sector financeability / bankability standards;
→ Creating public-private partnership opportunities by identifying investment niches and supporting scalable pilot projects.
... and More Context-Specific Stakeholders & Strategic Partners!
If we had had this platform earlier, the support toward accreditation for climate funds would have been much faster.
It is at the local level that projects which change citizens’ lives are conceived, planned, and implemented. But too often, we are forced to scale back our ambitions due to lack of proper funding, technical support, or access to information.
Our regional development plans must become true levers for investment. Our common platform will act as an accelerator for territorial transformation.
This platform is not only a space for dialogue, but also a catalyst for financial innovation. It should make Cameroon a continental beacon, a laboratory of excellence for localizing financing.
We need a strategy that attracts investors to our territories. The platform is intended to be our shared vehicle to meet the country’s development challenges.
The FYC Country Platform is fully aligned with the Pact for the Future led by UN member countries, with the dynamic of the Finance in Common Summit, and with the preparations for the FfD4 Conference in Seville. Cameroon is setting an example at the continental level.
The history of major reforms always begins with a moment of clarity, determination, and confidence. Today, Cameroon is sending a strong signal: a new development financing framework for its territories, designed and co-constructed by Cameroonian institutions.
NEWS ABOUT THE FYC COUNTRY PLATFORMS
The Country Platforms for Localizing Finance -FYC initiatives, supported by UCLG, the European Union, and ADEME, position themselves as a global pioneer, championing innovative localized finance mechanisms.
These platforms are more than funding and financing mechanisms — they are systems-building accelerators that foster alignment, inclusion, investment readiness and long-term sustainability.
By structuring and localizing finance, they help make development and climate transitions and transformations tangible where it matters most: in the daily lives of people and communities.
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