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 mobilization for SDG financing are required, as emphasized by expert groups and world leaders alike. See, for instance, Political Declaration at the 2023 SDG Summit and 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, for which reasons are numerous. One 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, in October 2024, we, a group of governments (Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, South Africa, and the United Kingdom) and private institutional investors (Allianz SE, CDPQ), formed 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). Further stakeholders have joined the initiative since then. In June 2025, the initiative was renamed SCALED.

As SCALED, formerly known as HSP, we are working towards standardisation of blended finance requirements, vehicle types, and processes. But we don’t stop there. We are also aiming to set up a specialised, first-of-its-kind entity – an engine which is capable of putting these standards immediately into practice. This service provider shall be dedicated to streamlining the entire development and management process of public-private cooperation for blended finance transactions, especially targeting large institutional investors.

The entity shall reduce transaction costs, while enhancing simplicity, efficiency, and speed of the process of setting up blended finance vehicles, making the latter more attractive to all participants and creating the basis for easier replicability and scaling. The entity’s built-in replication and learning from operations feed into the work on industry standardisation of blended finance requirements. Thus, we will enable more and large-scale private capital mobilisation and increased volumes of SDG-focused investment in EMDEs.

Depending on funding commitments, the entity aims to mobilize several billions of USD for sustainable development over the next 10 years. It 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 we facilitate will be guided by measurable, long-term impact – driving progress toward a more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable future.

We are building partnerships with other initiatives aiming to promote private capital mobilisation for sustainable development in EMDEs.