This UNDP Annual Report takes a look at the results we achieved with countries and communities through 12 intense months. It considers the role we played as the technical lead of the UN’s socio-economic response to the COVID-19 crisis, providing in-country analysis to help 144 countries better understand what action to take, deploying nearly US$1 billion to over 170 countries and territories, helping government and health systems to function, protecting jobs and livelihoods and rapidly expanding social protection.

It takes a look at how we played this role, pushing the boundaries of how UNDP thinks, delivers, invests and manages. It illustrates how #NextGenUNDP institutional and financial investments – such as the People for 2030 strategy, the UNDP Digital Strategy, the Global Policy Network, the Accelerator Labs Network and the creation of the Crisis Bureau – made it possible to offer a more coherent, rapid response.

The report features UNDP’s global ideas and research on building forward better, which we tabled in 2020 to lift the ambition of global policy responses. These ideas range from introducing a temporary basic income for all people living in poverty to launching a new, planetary pressures-adjusted Human Development Index – part of UNDP’s 30th anniversary look at The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene.

These pages also capture how, throughout 2020, UNDP held the thread between the micro and the macro, addressing urgent local needs and advancing global systemic change: clearing over 400 football fields-worth of land of explosives in war-hit Yemen to enable humanitarian aid to get to those in most need, for example, while expanding the Climate Promise – the world’s largest offer on enhancing Nationally Determined Contributions – to 115 countries.