Achieving Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) is a significant challenge for the developing world and critical to alleviating poverty. With the regional disparities, FSN remain strong and progress has been modest, in particular in Sub-Saharan Africa. One of the main challenges in many LDCs is the lack of financing mechanisms to increase public and private FSN investments that can fill the gap of local food systems, improve the local fiscal space and transform the local economy.

Over decades, UNCDF developed tools and instruments that strengthen the role of local government and that unlock domestic capital - public and private - for local economic development. These instruments help mobilize and leverage resources for investments in infrastructure, basic services delivery and entrepreneurship, with an emphasis on the transformative impact. Based on this bulk of experiences, F4F promotes locally born pipelines of investible projects and public investments with an impact on the Local Food System (LFS).

To achieve effective food security interventions coordinated and facilitated through Local Government in LDCs, F4F aims inter alia to help public and private investments by providing strategic financing in the form of grants, loans, guarantees, equity, and/or quasi-equity.

To be more effective, F4F uses Local Finance Initiative (LFI), an investment instrument of the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) designed to unlock the flow of domestic capital to finance infrastructure projects needed to accelerate local economic and private sector development.

In Benin, LFI, was launched in November 2015 and is designed to advance Local Economic Development (LED) at both national and district levels, to activate the private sector to support the financing of small and medium size infrastructure projects that contribute to strengthen Benin’s global and regional competitiveness, enhance the national and local business environment, reduce poverty and improve livelihoods at the local level. The Global LFI Program is supported by the Technical Secretariat based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.