Slovak - UNDP Partnerships

The partnership between the UNDP and the Slovak Republic emerged in the early 2000s to advise programme countries on their development policies, help them manage and evaluate projects, channel small grants, and manage professional exchange schemes. Gradually, the specific topics that the partnership has been dealing with for a long time have been identified; namely the support on public finance management, the support for private sector engagement and the promotion of innovation or security policy at the Western Balkan. The partnership is the oldest initiative of the kind in the region.  

The Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic (MFEA SR) and the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic (MF SR) are the main partners.

UNDP and MF SR Partnership

Public and Private Finance for Development – the project aims to facilitate sharing Slovak knowledge and experience in public finance management with partner countries, and to support higher involvement of private sector in international development cooperation. In the current phase, the project has two main components: Public Finance for Development and Private Sector for Development.

Public Finance for Development - launched in 2009,  the programme contributes to sound public finance management and good governance in partner countries. It focuses on providing technical assistance to and institutional capacity building in Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans countries that are going through public finance reforms. Partner countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, and North Macedonia. Ukraine was part of the programme until 2017.

Private Sector for Development

The Resource Mobilization Facility is a fund established to support pre-investment studies, such as feasibility studies, sectoral analyses, financing models, etc. for future investment projects under the auspices of the UNDP Country Offices. So far a number of  projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia have been supported in the area of energy efficiency, waste management and others.

The portfolio of projects supported by the Slovak Ministry of Finance also contains the Slovak Transformation Fund, a project serving as a catalyst regionally to create local level urban transformation models, supporting ecosystems of innovators and identifying pathways for leveraging innovative financial mechanisms. Its predecessor, Transformative Governance and Finance Facility, was introduced in 2015 and has engaged UNDP Country Offices and governments in the region in experimentation, sensemaking and knowledge sharing. It has piloted and implemented new projects, initiatives and ideas, inter alia Ministry of Data - an open data challenge in the Western Balkans and Black Sea regions which offers a platform for citizens to present creative data-driven tools and solutions to community issues, Alternative Finance Lab - a mechanism for exploring and tapping into new financial technologies and mechanisms to leverage investments for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, BOOST Impact Accelerator – an online acceleration program that amplifies, bridges and connects innovators across the region, and City Experiment Fund – a fund that accelerates urban system transformation through deployment of a portfolio approach at the city level.

UNDP and the MFEA SR Partnership

The currently running project, Effective Development Cooperation Solutions for the SDGs, was launched in 2018. It focuses primarily on creating an enabling environment for Slovak private companies to contribute to Slovakia’s international development cooperation and piloting new ODA programming modalities; strengthening the positioning of Slovakia as development cooperation provider in security sector reform.  Its main components are:

I.      The Slovak Challenge Fund (SCF) facilitates the transfer of Slovak know-how and innovative solutions that would address development challenges identified by two partner countries, North Macedonia, and the Republic of Moldova, and contribute to the achievement of the SDGs.

 Slovak expertise from private sector is sought to address specific development themes:

• Sustainable use of natural resources through improved water management, waste management, or increased energy efficiency and clean energy utilization in residential, agriculture and other sectors;
• Increased productivity, partnerships, access to markets and competitiveness of organic agriculture actors like farmers and producers;
• Introducing and improving e-governance and open data use in public sector management and delivery.

Guidelines of the Slovak Challenge Fund (PDF)
Selected Initiatives of the Slovak Challenge Fund (2020)

II.     The South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SEESAC) initiative related to Strengthening Regional Cooperation on Gender Mainstreaming in Security Sector Reform in the Western Balkans.

In the past, the project also supported the Ukraine Energy Efficiency Secretariat and Expert Hub that was managed by UNDP Ukraine. The overall purpose of the Hub was to strengthen the capacity of the Government of Ukraine to develop and implement its energy efficiency policy during the critical time of transition of the national energy markets, in particular gas and electricity.