Dessy sold nearly everything she owned – even her dowry – to fund her dream of becoming a street-food vendor. In Indonesia, where many people are often underserved by banks – the rise of digital banking has given entrepreneurs like Dessy better access to loans and money management services, helping their businesses to thrive. Presented By Bank Jago and Innovate Finance

Two brothers on different continents but with the same desire, to better their families lives. Although Luis’s brother left home behind to create a new life in the USA , he continues send money home to help the extended family in Guatemala. Without a bank account, receiving this money can be difficult for Luis. A new virtual bank card is and helping him take control of his financial wellbeing.   Guatemala City, Guatemala   Presented By Paysend and Innovate Finance

Presented by BFA Catalyst Fund

When Nigeria was struck by the worst floods for a decade in the summer of 2022, hundreds of thousands of acres of crops were destroyed, 25 million people were left at risk of food insecurity and 1.3 million people were displaced from their homes.

Aisha Raheem, founder and director at Farmz2U based in Nigeria, witnessed first-hand the impact on people. She recalls how one famer was left with no harvest and faced a year of uncertainty without a source of income. However, he had been able to procure insurance with the help of Farmz2U and was thankful for their support.

Many of the countries at the greatest risk from climate change, and with the fewest financial resources to deal with it, are in Africa. African countries make up eight of the 10 countries that will be most affected by climate change. The continent also has some of the highest toxic pollution risks and deaths resulting from toxic pollution, yet it is not the beneficiary of many of the industries that contribute to that pollution. 

Africa’s climate challenges are complicated and linked to wider global issues. Industries like rare earth element mining create pollution, but the benefits of those industries are not seen locally. Plastic waste pollutes neighbourhoods, but there is limited infrastructure to collect and recycle it. Rising temperatures damage crops and result in food insecurity, but it’s wealthier nations that are contributing most to the causes of those rises.

What does it mean to be climate resilient in Africa? 

The people well-placed to solve the climate challenges facing many African countries are the entrepreneurs developing their own solutions locally, which is why Catalyst Fund, a pre-seed venture capital (VC) fund and accelerator for early-stage tech founders in emerging markets, is investing in African startups that enable communities to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

Investments in businesses that build resilience against climate impacts are not only beneficial from an environmental and social perspective, they are sound commercial opportunities for investors too, says Maelis Carraro, managing partner at Catalyst Fund. Finding and supporting those entrepreneurs will help to secure the future of the continent. But African entrepreneurs who are committed to building a better future for their nations can be met with challenges when seeking investment. 

Carraro is using the enormous power of the VC fund to boost communities in the most vulnerable areas by supporting innovators who are using their platform for good. “Our mission is to back start-ups creating a more resilient future,” she says. “And in particular, solutions that leverage technology to build the resilience of climate-vulnerable communities, for example in sectors such as agriculture, insurance and waste management.” The fund has backed 71 start-ups in 15 markets to date, primarily in Africa.

It's one of the things that makes this worth it, because you're changing lives

– Aisha Raheem

“Currently, most of our investments are in the agriculture tech space, which is a reflection of the fact that agriculture is still the major economic driver for African countries,” says Carraro. One example is Farmz2U, an organisation which encourages farmers to take up regenerative farming practices – a term used to describe a wide variety of agricultural techniques that aim to minimise environmental damage by avoiding intensive farming methods. 

Aisha Raheem began her journey as an entrepreneur after having a health scare she believed was related to the food she was eating. Her experience encouraged her to address the poor nutritional value of food for some people in Nigeria, which is exacerbated by unsustainable farming methods. This personal story drew Catalyst Fund to Raheem. “When you know that a founder has had [a personal] story, a personal commitment, you know the drive is there,” says Carraro.

But farmers in Africa often face problems accessing funds to pay for changes to their farms. “If I want to access finance to grow my farm, it's very difficult to do that because I'll be asked questions like ‘what is my annual salary?’ or ‘what is my monthly cash flow’,” says Raheem. “But smallholder farmers tend to have more cyclical income flows. So the systems don't take into account the informal nature of their operations.”

Farmz2U also helps farmers navigate financing and insurance, so that if another disaster strikes they are better prepared. “It's one of the things that makes this worth it – because you're changing lives,” says Raheem.

Many people throughout Africa are under-insured, if not uninsured

– Souleymane Gning

Providing insurance is essential for preparing farmers for a climate-insecure future. “The fact of the matter is, [many people throughout Africa are] under-insured, if not uninsured, which is exposing them to further devastation – there's little social protection,” agrees Souleymane Gning, CEO at Assuraf, a digital insurance company based in Senegal and another of the Catalyst Fund members. 

“Insurance is one piece of the equation that can unlock financial security, which might enable somebody to therefore take more risks in their own business,” adds Carraro. If farmers, for example, can insure against loss of income from a climate disaster, they can have more confidence investing any profits they make in next year's harvest, possibly adding employees and scaling up their operations. Insurance is an enabler to economic growth, says Gning.

Another potential cause of loss that can be insured against is illness, adds Gning. “Health is a core thing in our vision, and we really want to drive more health protection on the continent, to everyone.” Insurance against illness can allow consumers to seek the help they need. 

”Health risks are also bound to increase because of rising temperatures, disasters and pollution,” says Carraro. According to the WHO, approximately 250,000 deaths a year linked to these climate challenges in Africa are anticipated from the year 2050. 

A huge amount of waste in Africa is mishandled, being dumped or burned, which causes significant challenges, including crop and farm soil damage and health issues. Bekia, the waste collection solution from Egypt, is tackling this problem. “The majority of the population in Egypt face a common problem – we have a lot of waste,” says Alaa Afifi, founder and CEO at Bekia, adding that there are localised waste solutions in Egypt, but none at a larger scale.

We’re changing people's mindset, but it’s not easy

– Alaa Afifi

Bekia encourages users to hand in segregated waste for recycling or processing in return for a micropayment paid directly into their mobile banking app or digital wallet. “We’re changing people's mindsets to segregate the waste, but it’s not easy,” says Afifi. “People consider waste as a part of their life.”

Currently the app has 75,000 users, but “the growth potential is massive”, Carraro says. Egypt has a population of over 100 million people, and Afifi has plans to scale Bekia in other countries across Africa. “I'm super lucky to be a part of Catalyst Fund,” he adds.

The common thread across all of this is that FinTech has a big role to play for affordability and accessibility, adds Carraro. “We've primarily focused on FinTech for financial inclusion, but we saw how financial services were actually becoming embedded in many essential real economy sectors like energy and agriculture.  [We thought] what can FinTech do here to make solutions radically affordable and accessible for climate-vulnerable populations?”

The Catalyst Fund portfolio also contains “moonshot” investments, like Octavia Carbon, a direct air carbon capture company that is the first of its kind in Kenya. Then there is Sand to Green in Morocco, which is leveraging desalination of seawater and brackish water, as well as agroforestry, to turn desert land into arable land. These are climate technology companies that rely less on fintech as an enabler “but they can have a huge impact on building stronger economies, energy systems and livelihoods,” says Carraro. 

The support that Catalyst Fund provides is about more than just capital. Carraro emphasises the importance of having access to their in-house team of specialists covering product, marketing, sales, growth, fundraising, tech and data engineering. All of whom have lived and oriented their professional lives around Africa and emerging markets, more broadly. She says their portfolio companies historically have an 86% survival rate, which is “really, really high for accelerators that invest as early as us. We hear over and over again from the founders after they've gone through our acceleration phase how the capital [gives] them more fuel, but what they really found invaluable was the support and access to networks.”

In 2023, Catalyst Fund invested in 10 companies, but Carraro is hoping to invest in 40 companies over the next four years. The target is to scale the fund to $40m (£32.5m). “We're still fundraising but look to close by early next year,” she concludes.

Raheem adds that the farmers whose livelihoods Farmz2U protects are in a better position to prepare for the next year and might be more confident to make investments with this assurance. She is optimistic that the future looks brighter thanks to African innovators like her and the other Catalyst Fund members. “I implore everyone to take a role to try and leave the world a bit better than they found it,” she says. “We all have a responsibility to make sure that that doomsday future isn't actually what we find ourselves in. We're excited about what the future holds and can't wait to continue growing and making the communities we operate in better.”

What is “spaghetti technology” and how is it slowing banks down? When Paul noticed that many banks were stuck in the pre-internet era, he made it his mission to bring them up to speed. By giving banks smooth, cloud-based platforms, he is cleaning up an industry bogged down by old systems.   London, United Kingdom   Presented By Thought Machine and Innovate Finance

Presented By Innovate Finance

By changing how we think about money, we could have a positive impact on the world around us.

When Norwegian shoppers started to see red, amber or green notices on their receipts in 2021, a few eyebrows were raised. An online supermarket in the Nordic country had begun using the traffic light system to draw attention to the carbon emissions from products in shoppers’ baskets. A red notice indicated the basket contained above average emissions for groceries bought at the store, with a green notice indicating the basket scored better than average. The hope is that shoppers would be encouraged to switch from high-carbon buying habits to lower-carbon alternatives.

This kind of carbon-counting nudge tactic is catching on, because how we choose to spend our money on a daily basis can have a meaningful impact on our total carbon emissions. Earthchain, a carbon-tracking platform which breaks down the emissions related to daily spending making it easier for consumers to see how their money affects the climate, is one such example. 

Earthchain enables institutions that have spending data, like banks, retailers and fintech companies, to gain emissions insights from that data. “We can aggregate that into a report which allows you to break down your spending by a carbon budget rather than by a financial budget,” says Dan Graf, founder of Earthchain. “So, you can see, for example, which are the top five areas of your spending that are the most carbon intensive.”

Still startup sized, the company is working with one major bank in the UK to explore how this data could help their customers understand the impact of their spending, and has an app open to anyone which helps nudge consumers towards smarter behaviours.

Graf has worked in financial technology for over 20 years, building systems to process debit and credit card transactions in real time. In those roles, he was exposed to trillions of transactions. “You could watch a person walking down a high street in data. I had this feeling that wouldn't leave me that you can use that information to get some really exciting data about somebody's spending habits with respect to the climate,” he says.

Graf says that Earthchain has behavioural insights that they have gathered through app usage. For example, he says consumers are often surprised to see the difference in emissions from food products grown locally or imported. 

“I think consumers are not very well informed about the impact of their choices,” he says.

“People think that if a product was shipped a long way it is automatically bad. But, it's not always the case.”

For example, fruit and vegetables locally produced in season have low carbon costs. But, buying local fruit and vegetables out of season might be worse than buying imported products from other countries. Tomatoes produced out of season in the UK, for example, are grown in heated greenhouses which have higher total emissions than tomatoes grown in hotter places like Spain.

This is just one example which illustrates that the emissions associated with our spending choices are not always straightforward to calculate. Earthchain is able to capture some of this complexity by working with both retailers and banks. On the retailer side, they are able to see all the goods in consumers' shopping baskets and, with the help of postgraduate students at the University of Manchester, have developed an estimation engine that can calculate emissions from individual products.

“But, on the banking side it's a little bit like taking your glasses off – everything's a little bit more fuzzy,” says Graf. “But we temper that because we can also take consumer preferences and habits into account. So, if we know that the individual we're looking at has a vegan dietary habit and drives an electric vehicle, then we can also assume that their basket is not going to be full of prime rib beef.” So, between user, bank and retailer data, Earthchain is able to build up a profile of a consumer to give a best estimate of where their money enables emissions. 

Graf says that a good estimate is likely the best-case scenario. “Carbon footprinting is not an exact science,” he says.

“If anybody claims they can tell you down to the gram what your carbon emissions are, don't listen to them. What we're doing is giving guidance based on the best available data that we have.”

Graf says that awareness that there is a carbon cost to every financial transaction might encourage consumers to change how they use their money. Aside from daily spending, pensions, investments and savings work on longer timescales and therefore can take account of issues like climate change. 

A pension, for example, is a type of investment – a pension provider invests their customers’ savings in stocks and shares. Worldwide, $56tn (£41tn) is invested in pension funds – that's more than the GDP of the US, China, Japan, Germany and the UK combined, so collectively they have an enormous power to create positive change, says Daniel Lopez Dias, founder of Route2, a London-based sustainability insights company.

Switching from an average UK pension to a sustainable equivalent, for example, could result in a saving of 19 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) each year. For many people, switching pensions is the simplest and most effective way to reduce their carbon emissions, says Lopez Dias. 

But arriving at a figure like this is no easy feat. If Lopez Dias were to calculate the emissions from an investment, in a perfect scenario, he would be able to see every single holding in the pension portfolio. For example, if a pension fund holds 1% of the shares of 10 companies, each of which are responsible for emitting 100 tonnes of carbon, then that fund is responsible for one tonne of carbon emissions.

“However, when it comes to looking across the pension industry, you don't have that level of information,” says Lopez Dias. “But you can get access to some of the major pension providers’ overviews of funds which might be 20% invested in technology, 10% in utilities and 30% in food manufacturing, or something like that. And then they will also tell you the geographic spread of their investments, for example, 80% in the UK, 5% in France, and 15% in the United States. 

From this, an estimate can be created of the carbon emissions that are enabled by the fund based on how it's allocating capital across different sectors and geographies. It might seem odd to think that people saving for their pension are contributing to the carbon emissions of large corporations, but Lopez Dias says it’s not such a stretch.

“We have taken the stance, and we think it's a fair stance, that if you own shares in a company [as pension-holders do] then you have some responsibility for the good and the bad,” says Lopez Dias. “Shareholders have the power to change the trajectory of a company.”

By switching from a fund more heavily invested in developed nations and in higher-carbon industries like fossil fuel companies, energy suppliers and mining organisations to lower-carbon industries and less developed nations, a saver could dramatically reduce their emissions over their saving lifetime. Fortunately, many pension providers are starting to offer more sustainable pensions and make switching easy.

Financial services can accelerate change at scale, ensuring money is deployed in line with climate targets, and promoting institutional investments in renewable energy projects and nature-positive solutions. Money has a lot of power to do some good if consumers become more aware of the ways their money impacts the climate, whether through the stocks in which their savings are invested or the transactions they make on a daily basis. Shifting our collective thinking could make positive changes.