UNDP’s new Strategic 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.

After rebounding in 2021, global growth is expected to decelerate markedly in 2022, reflecting continued COVID-19 flare-ups, diminished fiscal support, and lingering supply bottlenecks.

As the new year opens, the world is battling a global pandemic and confronting a planetary emergency. Both COVID-19 and climate change are contributing to rising inequality, conflict and fragility around the world. These interconnected challenges require integrated solutions. In 2022, UNDP puts its new Strategic Plan into action, grounded in our commitment to eradicating poverty and helping countries achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Here are some key moments to watch in the year ahead.

Has the global economy recovered from COVID-19? Will prices continue to rise? When will the jobs come back? Find out at the launch of the World Economic Situation and Prospects 2022 report on 13 January (12 pm EST). It provides an overview of recent global economic performance and short-term prospects. After a strong recovery in 2021, global growth momentum seems to be losing steam and higher levels of inequality could emerge as a longer-term scar of the pandemic. The report calls for better targeted policy and financial measures.

Sustainability goes beyond the environment; it includes other things that people need towards quality of life. FAO suggests what you can do to make this holiday sustainable, merry and bright.

Peru is among the world’s 10 megadiverse countries. But despite its many resources some 4.5 million people face severe food insecurity. Several communities are advancing towards sustainability for Peruvian food systems.  

It was a challenging year for families everywhere. Alongside a pandemic that has taken millions of lives, the broader socio-economic effects of COVID-19 reversed decades of important gains for the most vulnerable. UNDP doubled down on its commitment to build forward better, working with partners at all levels of society to ensure people have the means to live in dignity, and the skills and resources to recover from crises and create fulfilling lives. Here are some of their stories.

From uneven economic recovery to unequal access to vaccines; from widening income losses to divergence in learning, COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on the poor and vulnerable in 2021. It is causing reversals in development and is dealing a setback to efforts to end extreme poverty and reduce inequality. Because of the pandemic, extreme poverty rose in 2020 for the first time in over 20 years. Through this series of charts and graphs, we share select research from the World Bank Group that illustrates the severity of the pandemic.

For nomadic herders in the mountains of Mongolia, traditional cheeses offer a sustainable alternative to tourism income, with benefits for snow leopard conservation. The majority of people in this region live in semi-nomadic subsistence communities that make a living from livestock herding. For these communities, ecotourism represents an increasingly important part of the economy that simultaneously promotes the conservation of local biodiversity. But when the pandemic hit, the dramatic loss of international tourists shuttered the ecotourism industry in Mongolia.

Promoting regional knowledge and South–South cooperation, UNCTAD’s TrainForTrade port management programme has created a network to help port communities reboot their economies.

Developing productive capacities in least developed countries (LDCs) is necessary for boosting their response to and recover from crises such as COVID-19, according to a recent UNCTAD report.

Women Entrepreneurs was launched to support businesswomen in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 2010 and it was then relaunched in 2018 to support women living in the most vulnerable neighbourhoods of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The initiative has been funded by the Korean International Cooperation Agency and implemented by UNDP in collaboration with the community platforms. As such, Women Entrepreneurs has been providing training and enhancing women’s business skills, thereby boosting their autonomy and resilience.

Commodity prices across the board have increased significantly in recent months in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. A new UNCTAD study reviews the price increases and their potential. The report underlines that structural differences across the region will likely result in heterogenous impacts of commodity price increases on trade and GDP growth. Most importantly, the high level of uncertainty on commodity markets and the high degrees of commodity dependence across the region underscore the need to boost the resilience of LAC economies to future shocks.

Without resolute measures to address this growing divide, COVID‑19 will continue to claim lives and destroy jobs, inflicting lasting damage to investment, productivity, and growth in the most vulnerable countries. The pandemic will further disrupt the lives of the most vulnerable with rising extreme poverty and malnutrition, shattering all hope of attaining the SDGs. The IMF suggests narrowing the pandemic divide through collective action to boost access to vaccines, secure critical financing, and accelerate the transition to a greener, digital, and more inclusive world.

Nobody has a crystal ball. How we can prepare for an increasingly uncertain future when we don't know what it is? Hello Future is a UNDP video series exploring the trends shaping our world. From digitalization to inequality, to the climate emergency, to crisis response, we examine the critical issues facing humans and the place we call home, and what we must do if we're to get out of this century alive.

The global economic recovery continues, but with a widening gap between advanced economies and many emerging market and developing economies, IMF reports. Growth prospects for advanced economies this year have improved by 0.5 percentage point, but this is offset exactly by a downward revision for emerging market and developing economies driven by a significant downgrade for emerging Asia. Faster-than-expected vaccination rates and return to normalcy lead to upgrades, while lack of access to vaccines and renewed waves of COVID-19 cases in some countries, notably India, lead to downgrades.