Established in 2003 and housed within the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office (MPTF Office) facilitates UN coherence and development effectiveness in addressing multifaceted issues—such as humanitarian crises, peacebuilding, recovery, and development—and engages in collaborative international efforts on pandemics, climate change, and biodiversity conservation.

These complex challenges demand the combined expertise and resources of multiple development partners. The MPTF Office assists the UN system and national governments in establishing and administering pooled financing mechanisms—multi-donor trust funds and joint programmes—to collect and allocate funding from a diversity of financial contributors to a wide range of implementing entities in a coordinated manner. These funding mechanisms build on the principles of the aid effectiveness agenda, which calls for country-driven, coherent, timely, flexible, and result-oriented assistance.

UN and national pooled funding mechanisms do not follow a rigid template or provide a one-size-fits-all solution; programming priorities drive the selection of funding sources and governance, implementing, and fiduciary arrangements. Implementation is similarly flexible and may involve UN agency, mixed or national execution—with an emphasis on using countries’ own public financial management systems to channel funds, an objective increasingly integrated into multi-donor funds, particularly in transition contexts.

Services

Funds have a number of common design and governance features. These usually include an oversight and decision-making body such as a steering committee, a secretariat, implementing entities, and fund administrator or trustee, ensuring a strong division of responsibilities between fund administration, operation, and implementation.

The MPTF Office provides trust-fund establishment, administration, and advisory services to and on behalf of the entire United Nations system and national governments, bringing together and capitalizing on the strengths of individual agencies. The MPTF Office service platform encompasses the entire trust fund management cycle, from needs analysis, fund architecture design and fund establishment to day-to-day financial management and, ultimately fund closure.

The MPTF Office services the entire United Nations system in support of One United Nations principles, which echo and reinforce the international consensus on the need to improve existing aid delivery processes. Although housed within UNDP, the MPTF Office is firewalled from all UN implementing entities, UNDP included.