The economic transitions needed to reach the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) require substantial amounts of development financing and investment. The 2024 Financing for Sustainable Development Report estimates the SDG financing and investment gap at between USD 2.5 trillion and USD 4 trillion annually. Thus, accelerated efforts towards private capital mobilisation for SDG financing are required, as emphasized by expert groups and world leaders alike, such as in the, Political Declaration at the 2023 SDG Summit and the 2024 Pact for the Future.

Blended finance, i.e., the catalytic use of public funding to leverage private capital for SDG investment, has increasingly emerged as a promising instrument. However, the necessary scaling has remained limited to date. The most important bottleneck is the protracted and complicated process of capital formation: blended finance vehicles (e.g., funds) tend to be complex and customised, which makes them cumbersome to set up, replicate, and scale. Long lead times and a lack of standardisation imply lengthy and unpredictable due diligence processes that reduce their attractiveness for private investors.

Therefore, at the first Hamburg Sustainability Conference (HSC) in October 2024,  the governments of Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, South Africa, and the United Kingdom and private institutional investors Allianz SE, CDPQ, joined forces to build the Hamburg Sustainability Platform (HSP) to work towards overcoming structural challenges of blended finance and unleash its full potential to mobilise large-scale private capital for SDG investment in emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs). By HSC 2025, further stakeholders had joined the initiative, which was renamed SCALED.

SCALED is promoting standardisation in the blended finance ecosystem. To turn its mission into practice, the initiative laid the groundwork for the launch of the company SCALED Development, which was announced in June 2026. This specialised advisory company, the first of its kind, is designed to make blended finance more scalable, more systematic, and easier to replicate. To learn more about SCALED Development, please visit its website.

Depending on funding commitments, SCALED aims to mobilize several billions of USD for sustainable development over the next 10 years. SCALED Development will build a series of blended finance vehicles for large-scale capital mobilisation into sustainable investment across a wide range of regions and SDGs. Every investment will be guided by measurable, long-term impact – driving progress toward a more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable future.