Mitigating soil, weather and climate challenges through innovative finance for regenerative agriculture in India
Rabo Foundation in collaboration with a leading European Foundation will be launching India's first financing program for gender focused regenerative agriculture and circular use in agriculture. This program has been set up after extensive discussions with Indian Agriculture stakeholders. The 5 year financing program aims to address the issues of soil, weather and climate challenges.
The innovative financing program is being fronted by four Indian financing institutions (FIs) who will offer a bouquet of short term working capital and long term investment credit. These FIs have been carefully selected keeping in view their ambition on climate and agriculture financing. This innovative program is being facilitated by a revolving guarantee to the Indian FIs and the total financing over the program period is expected to be over USD 60 million dollars.
The two foundations will also set up an elaborate Technical Assistance program with the partner FIs and the potential borrowers for Monitoring & Evaluation. A linkage will be made to all the agriculture players engaged in climate related activities in India.
This program aims to sharpen the green financing of financing institutions and enable them to deepen and widen their climate portfolio.
Supporting community-based ed-tech innovations through blended finance
The Back-to-School Outcomes Fund brings together a consortium of trusted partners, including USAID, the British Asian Trust, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Bridges Outcomes Partnership and UBS Optimus Foundation through the SDG Outcomes Fund, Kaizenvest, Central Square Foundation, and Dalberg. It is designed to address the significant learning losses among children due to COVID-19. The Fund aims to improve foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) in over a million children, as well as generate evidence to inform the Government of India's NIPUN Bharat Mission. It comprises a Development Impact Bond (DIB) to test and scale effective interventions in public school systems and an accelerator to nurture at-home and community-based ed-tech innovations. It builds on the extensive experience of partners supporting outcome payment frameworks in education such as the Educate Girls Development Impact Bond and the Quality Education India Development Impact Bond. The Fund will launch in September 2022.
If you would like to support this initiative as a partner/funder, please reach out to Anushree Parekh for further information at
[email protected]