Objectives
Fund scope
The global community continues to face significant challenges in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), responding effectively to crises, and meeting the demands of a rapidly changing world. Traditional approaches to diplomacy and development are no longer sufficient to address complex and interrelated global issues like climate change, poverty, conflict, and inequality.
UN Global Pulse is a platform and enabler for innovation to accelerate key UN agendas, including the Sustainable Development Goals, Our Common Agenda, and UN 2.0. It supports the transformation of the United Nations into a more dynamic and resilient ‘next generation’ institution, building on over a decade of experience in data and digital innovation. It serves the whole UN family on a global level.
The UN Global Pulse Network is a Multi-Partner Trust Fund (MPTF), providing a unified platform for UN entities, experts, and civil society stakeholders to collaboratively innovate, while ensuring transparency, flexibility, and shared risk-taking. It operates on the premise that innovation is vital for organizations to keep pace with a rapidly changing world and to achieve the SDGs.
Strategic action and theory of change
UN Global Pulse champions innovation in the multilateral system by encouraging experimentation and collaboration among UN actors, technical experts, member states, the private sector and other stakeholders. Its approach is designed to address key challenges currently faced by innovators within the UN family, including limited channels for linking technical experts with real-world applications, limited support structure for scaling solutions across the UN family, a scarcity of testing environments for experimentation, and limited fit-for-purpose avenues to develop and hire next-generation talent into the United Nations.
To effectively address these issues, the Global Pulse Network drives action through three impact levels:
- Regional Hubs serve as hosts and facilitators for on-the-ground innovation projects and solution scaling by applying data, digital, foresight, innovation and behavioural science methods to regional challenges.
- Our Global Catalyst hosts innovation initiatives with a UN system-wide or global reach that address challenges and needs shared by a variety of partners, typically designed to be scalable across the UN system.
- The Global Capability Hub is a driver for learning, adoption, and replication of innovation and modern ‘UN 2.0’ skills amongst the UN family and its partners.
Promoting internal change in complex organizations is challenging and requires an underlying cultural shift. Global Pulse stakeholders have designed this three-level setup that relies on collaboration to offer an engaging ecosystem where regional and global innovation portfolios work hand in hand with capability building.
Thematically, the UN Global Pulse Network operates across the central United Nations pillars of Sustainable Development, Humanitarian Action, Human Rights, and Peacebuilding and Prevention, in support of global agendas like “Our Common Agenda” and “UN 2.0”, and the Sustainable Development Goals.
> $55M 
$55M - $25M
$25M - $5M
< $5M
