Call it the Montego Bay manifesto.
In late April, a group of impact investors, policymakers and entrepreneurs gathered in Jamaica to map strategies for channeling private capital from the Global North to climate solutions in the Global South. In their sights: the COP30 global climate talks coming up in November in Belém, Brazil.
The role of private capital will be even more urgent this year, with public funding, not to mention political leadership, for climate action in retreat in the US and around the globe.
“The regions most vulnerable to climate shocks – yet where targeted investments could generate outsized benefits for communities and ecosystems – continue to be severely under-resourced in their climate efforts,” says Marilyn Waite of the Climate Finance Fund. That’s especially true, she said, for small businesses that operate in capital-scarce environments.
The philanthropic fund, which has allocated more than $75 million since 2018, is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and hosted by the European Climate Foundation.
Waite points to the $450 trillion in global capital parked in banks, retirement and pension accounts and insurance companies and private equity funds as an under-tapped source of climate funding. The challenge is steering that capital across national borders and around real and perceived risks in emerging markets, especially for climate-focused startups and small businesses.
Waite’s fund underwrote the inaugural Global Climate Finance Forum, or GCFF, in Jamaica’s Montego Bay to workshop strategies for mobilizing private finance for Global South-led solutions with the goal of developing an action plan for the COP30 proceedings. Small and medium-sized businesses are largely absent from the initial COP30 agenda.
Jamaica was chosen as a location in part for its accessibility. Climate advocates from emerging market face now face even more onerous visa requirements for events in the US and other wealthy nations and, if they can get in, steep costs (disclosure: Climate Finance Fund picked up the cost of accommodations for attendees, including ImpactAlpha, and covered airfare for Global South attendees). Jamaica is visa-free for nearly 100 countries. “Global conversations should not happen in places the Global Majority cannot access,” says Waite.
The 50 or so delegates at the forum hailed from 17 countries, including Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Nepal and Rwanda, Trinidad, and Tobago. The venue, a historic and once exclusionary resort on Montego Bay, is under Black management for the first time.
The three-day conference generated high level policy and investment recommendations and three-dozen concrete commitments from participants. The ideas will inform a Montego Bay Letter to COP30 organizers that aims to elevate Global South small and mid-sized enterprises, or SMEs, in the talks and advocate for small-business-friendly reforms.
Specific recommendations included piloting blended finance structures that pair local asset managers with Global North institutional investors to address risk perception and improve scale, and addressing currency mismatch through fund-level innovations and cross-border learning.
“If we remove the bottlenecks and blindspots on the supply side, the financial and other forms of capital can flow to lubricate and facilitate these development efforts,” said Resilience Capital Ventures’ Gillian Marcelle, who participated in the forum.
The GCFF will be carried forward by the Emerging Markets Investors Alliance, a nonprofit that works with institutional emerging market investors and will act as secretariat.
MoBay to Belém
Delegates arrived in Jamaica ready to roll up their sleeves. What they were not focused on: government aid, development banks and other typical sources of financing for emerging market small businesses.
Instead, attendees brainstormed ways to catalyze private financing by mitigating macroeconomic risks such as policy shifts and currency fluctuations and addressing common obstacles that prevent the private sector from investing in emerging market enterprises. Underpinning the recommendations are an understanding that solutions must be locally tailored and led, and that investors and policymakers must get closer to the ground to be effective allies.
Among the recommendations:
- Advocate for tax incentives to encourage institutional and retail investors to invest in Global South-listed equities, bonds, and private equity vehicles. Carbon Collective’s open-access database Climate Solution Stocks identifies climate-focused companies listed on stock exchanges around the world. (For another example, see, “Early growth-stage companies are going public – in Africa”).
- Mobilize sovereign wealth funds and large pension funds to allocate a defined share of their portfolios toward Global South climate startups and small businesses. (For one example from Uganda, see “Ugandan pension fund is creating new savers with investments in small business and agriculture (video)”).
- Change investor perceptions of risk that hold back many promising climate-focused small businesses in the Global South (for an exception among private equity firms, see, “Pegasus Capital eyes orphaned climate projects in emerging markets”). A coordinated public relations campaign could help shift the narrative from risk to Global South innovation and help firms take advantage of such “perception arbitrage.”
- Develop a registry of investable climate-focused small businesses and regional aggregators to improve deal visibility and facilitate investor matchmaking.
- Measure impact with locally grounded frameworks. Impact measurement can be onerous for small enterprises, but can help attract investors. Local frameworks aligned with SDG 13 (Climate Action) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) can help.
- Engage startups and small businesses in the design of investment-readiness tools to avoid extractive or one-size-fits-all approaches
Unleashing capital “will require working with activators that have grounded, context specific knowledge,” said Marcelle. GCFF, she added, “can play a unique role in facilitating cross-regional learning and scaling these efforts.”
Global South innovation
Emerging markets will require up to $2 trillion a year to green their growing economies and adapt to the here-and-now effects of climate change they did little to bring about. Global climate talks and finance typically focus on large projects, such as renewable energy infrastructure or debt-to-nature swaps, but startups and small businesses — a key source of innovation and job creation in emerging markets — barely factor in the discussions.
Small and medium-sized enterprises “are the engine of our economy and their role in climate action is pivotal,” said Tashmeem Muntazir Chowdhury of Brac Bank in Bangladesh, who flew 30 hours to attend the conference. “Empowering them with climate finance isn’t just good for business, it’s essential for building a more resilient, low-carbon future.”
Several successful climate-focused startups showcased their ready-to-scale solutions and helped investors understand the obstacles they face. Courageous Land in Brazil works with land stewards on large scale reforestation projects and helps them optimize for biodiversity, carbon sequestration and community income from sustainable forest products such as cacao, acai and timber. In India, Nunam gives discarded electric vehicle batteries a second life as energy story solutions.
Grid Africa is deploying small-scale, distributed solar systems to stabilize critical infrastructure in regions such as Zambia experiencing severe power shortages. Koolboks offers solar refrigeration to small business owners in Africa on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Mutirão
COP30, in the Amazon gateway city of Belém, presents a pivotal opportunity to raise up voices and innovative solutions from the Global South. Where previous COP hosts talked of a “North Star” to guide their discussions, COP30 president André Corrêa do Lago prefers a “Southern Cross.” The COP30 organizers have also embraced the Brazilian indigenous concept of “mutirão,” which refers to a community coming together to work on a shared task, such as harvesting or building.
The Global Climate Finance Forum itself is a kind of mutirão. Waite, who ends her term at the Climate Finance Fund in January 2026, created the conference to provide an alternative to Global North-dominated discussions and put the focus squarely on small and medium sized enterprises that are engines of economic growth and climate impact.
“GCFF is an action-oriented community where the voice of the Global Majority is centered and concrete steps towards mobilizing private capital for climate solutions through SMEs are taken,” she says.
That ethos was embedded in the forum’s design, from the vegetarian food to the participatory sessions to the accessible location.
Jamaica, like other climate-vulnerable Caribbean nations, has taken steps to be a leader in green finance.
“Every public investment project in Jamaica must now include a climate risk assessment — we don’t build schools or roads without it,” Matthew Samuda with Jamaica’s Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation told attendees. The island nation is ramping up renewable energy to reduce reliance on imported oil, awarding 100 megawatts of solar and wind projects last year. Wigton Windfarm, a local wind developer listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange, is expanding into solar.
Support for homegrown businesses is part of the strategy. The Development Bank of Jamaica has provided grants and loans for climate-focused local businesses, and last year invested nearly $5 million into an early stage venture capital fund managed by Mscale LLC that will back Jamaican startups, including ones focused on climate solutions.
The Jamaican government and development bank are also working with the Green Climate Fund and development bank partners to set up a $500 million “blue green fund” to crowd in private capital to finance climate mitigation and resilience initiatives across the island. “The Blue Green Fund will allow private investors to engage meaningfully with government and multilateral conversations in one structure,” Samuda explained.
Another asset is Jamaica’s diaspora, mostly located in North America, which contributes some $3 billion to the island’s economy each year. Blue Mahoe Capital, founded by Jamaicans living in Miami, is tapping that patient capital with a “diaspora bond” to fund the development of affordable, climate-resilient housing in Jamaica. The minimum investment is just $100.
“Jamaica is not only climate smart,” Waite says. “It’s climate genius.”
