CASE STUDY

Digital Finance for Climate Resilience (DF4CR) Initiative

Client: BFA Global

THE CHALLENGE

In March of 2021, an open roundtable was co-convened by BFA Global and the UN Race to Resilience to explore opportunities to leverage fintech and digital finance solutions to enhance the resilience and adaptation of vulnerable emerging market communities to the climate crisis. Participants in this roundtable gathering included PayPal, CGAP, World Resources Institute, and the UN Better Than Cash Alliance, along with invited expert guests. The convening identified the need for an ecosystem-building effort to accelerate both entrepreneurial innovation and new investment into climate-focused fintech and digital finance solutions, with an emphasis on venture founders from affected emerging market economies.

SOLUTION

Shining Rock Ventures played a leading role in a global benchmarking, framework development and consultative industry exercise that involved dozens of leading institutions focused on the intersection of climate and financial inclusion. This effort, known as the Digital Finance for Climate Resilience (DF4CR) Initiative, was primarily funded by PayPal, and culminated in rollout of a global framework for action at COP26 in Edinburgh, UK in late 2021.

This framework focused on a collaborative, decentralized network-building approach to attracting leading institutions from across five key actor groups—Innovators, Investors, Funders, Enablers, and Policymakers—critical to achieving ‘irruption,’ or dramatic, rapid, and transformative change, to enable 1 billion vulnerable people to achieve greater climate resilience and adaptability by 2030, and to crowd in over $200 billion in investment during this same timeframe.

OUTCOME

Since the DF4CR Initiative was rolled out in 2021, major additional partners joined the effort, including

  • Financial Services Deepening—Africa

  • British International Investment

  • GSMA Foundation

  • Mercy Corps Ventures

  • MicroSave Consulting

  • MasterCard-Center for Inclusive Growth

  • Catalyst Fund, and the IUCN (as an observer)

The DF4CR Initiative was reimagined as the Climate Innovation for Adaptation and Resilience (or CIFAR) Alliance, and over 80 global organizational partners have been involved as participants in a number of applied-research and knowledge-building ‘CoLabs.’ Funders of CIFAR Alliance have included PayPal, FSDA, MetLife Foundation, MasterCard - Center for Inclusive Growth, MasterCard Foundation, and JP Morgan Chase.

In 2022 and again in 2023, the CIFAR Alliance has been a co-sponsor of the Global Resilience Hub at COP27 and COP28, respectively, and has launched numerous venture-building initiatives, including the TECA Venture Launcher, and the Universal Climate Insurance Initiative, as well as ground-breaking knowledge products in the areas of Web3 Applications, Voluntary Carbon Markets, Regenerative Agriculture and AgTech, Elevating the Voice of Affected People, and other areas that have engaged hundreds of individual and institutional leaders and innovators working toward climate adaptation and resilience for vulnerable people worldwide.

Shining Rock Ventures has continued to support the CIFAR Alliance, most recently through the co-creation of a Strategic Governance Framework and Roadmap in 2023. Shining Rock Ventures Principal & CEO also serves on a fractional basis as Co-Lead for the CIFAR Alliance Global Secretariat.

David del Ser, Chairman, BFA Global

“Shining Rock Ventures was a key partner for us and our founders’ circle of leading organizations – Paypal, CGAP, UN Better Than Cash Alliance, World Resources Institute, and UN Race to Resilience – as we conducted a global landscape assessment around the intersection of tech innovation, investment and entrepreneurship for climate resilience, and then built out an action-framework to accelerate these goals.”

— David del Ser, Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer, BFA Global