Sida strengthens its commitment to supporting GIF’s climate work.

We’re delighted to announce that Sida, Sweden’s government agency for development cooperation, has reaffirmed its partnership with GIF, allocating an additional 70m SEK ($6.6 million) to help us invest in more innovations across the developing world, including those focused on climate adaptation and resilience.

Sida has been partnering with GIF since our launch eight years ago and has played a critical role in our development. Sida’s funding and the expansion of the scope of our existing grant agreement for the period 2022-2024 will help us continue to operationalise our climate commitment.

GIF’s climate strategy has had an investment focus on resilience and adaptation since its launch in 2021. This approach recognises that resilience and adaptation are greatly underfunded in the developing world even though research from the Global Commission on Adaptation demonstrates a 4:1 benefit/cost ratio. Funding for innovation, and especially between pilot stage and commercial stage, is particularly scarce, and this ‘pioneer gap’ is GIF’s sweet spot for investment.

The GIF team now applies a climate lens to every investment that is put through GIF’s investment process and is considered for prospective funding. However, the launch of our Innovating for Climate Resilience and Adaptation Fund specifically allows us to invest in the best innovations in resilience and adaptation, with a commitment to evidence and rigour. We made our first investments from this fund in 2022 and provide further details here.

GIF’s core mission of poverty reduction is inherently about building the human foundations of resilience and adaptation. Our innovations make people wealthier, healthier and better educated, and they advance women’s empowerment. This builds on people’s capacity to withstand shocks and adapt to today’s climate stresses and those that are coming.

GIF is experienced in areas such as migration, women’s agency, behavioural nudges, agriculture, water supply, remote sensing, and harnessing data for decision-making. All of these have a strong part to play in adaptation and resilience, and focusing GIF’s efforts and resources on these areas makes us particularly impactful and additional.

By supporting GIF’s expansion of scope to include climate and biodiversity, Sida is enabling us to and address the gap we see at the intersection of climate, innovation and impact investing, and conduct a wide-raging search for impactful ideas with the potential to scale.

GIF also hopes to contribute to better understanding and measurement of adaptation impacts. This is why we will develop metrics and contribute to ongoing initiatives in the climate finance community.