Climate Finance | March 15, 2018

New financing facilities blend capital to meet the 2030 Global Goals

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As we say at ImpactAlpha: to get to the trillions needed to bridge the gap in funding for the Sustainable Development Goals, you first need to get to the billions. Early efforts to do just that are showing promise.

A tally last year put total funds mobilized by 187 blended finance deals since the early eighties at $51 billion. New innovative finance schemes are also notching impressive tallies.

Last month, the Tropical Landscapes Financing Facility, designed originally by ADM Capital and the ADM Capital Foundation, closed $95 million from institutional investors to finance the sustainable production of rubber in Indonesia.

The grant for the design of TLFF came from Convergence, the Toronto-based blended finance platform, which has provided $5 million in funding for the design of 15 such blended finance vehicles. Three of the projects have now raised a total of $116 million. The goal of each is to drive large-scale private capital toward the global goals by leveraging public and philanthropic funding.

>>MORE: TLFF issues $95 million sustainable rubber bond in Indonesia

Palladium, which also received a Convergence design grant, raised $9 million for its Utkrisht impact bond, which will provide maternal and newborn health interventions for 600,000 women over three years in Rajasthan, India.

Alina Vision, another Convergence grantee, raised $12 million in equity and grant funds from Australian-based Fred Hollows Foundation and Japanese pharmaceuticals company Rohto to build a network of 60 affordable eye care hospitals. Funding for the Convergence design grants comes from the Canadian government.

Innovative finance

A recent commitment from the Green Climate Fund for the expansion of Energy Savings Insurance in Latin America pushed capital mobilized by the 25 climate-action investment vehicles launched by the Climate Finance Lab passed the $1 billion mark.

Initiative 20×20, a country-led effort to restore 20 million hectares of land in Latin America and the Caribbean by 2020, has secured more than $2 billion in private investor commitments.

The Rockefeller Foundation, through its “Zero Gap” portfolio, is on the hunt for SDG unicorns, innovative financial structures that can mobilize at least $1 billion each for sectors key to meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. It has funded the design and testing, as well as the sharing, of more than 30 new financial structures, including the Extreme Climate Facility and Land Degradation Neutrality Fund, which have each mobilized more than $300 million climate solutions.

>>MORE: Here come the SDG-finance unicorns