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#Dealflow: Follow the Money
Citi Foundation commits $100 million to boost youth employment. The donation to its Pathways to Progress initiative is Citi Foundation’s largest gift ever. Pathways launched in 2014 with $50 million to support first jobs, internships and training for urban youth in 10 U.S. cities. Pathways will use half of the new infusion to expand globally, with a three-year goal of reaching 500,000 urban youths aged 16 to 24 in Beijing, Casablanca, Johannesburg, London, Madrid, Mexico City, Mumbai, São Paulo, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei and Warsaw.
Sonen Capital raises $75 million to invest in sustainable real assets. Sonen Capital has closed its first fund for investments in real assets like buildings, energy infrastructure and land. The San Francisco-based investment manager already has made eight investments in affordable housing, clean energy, and timber in the U.S. Africa and Asia. Launched in 2012, Sonen has nearly $400 million under management and impact investment strategies in fixed income, focused on green and community bonds, and publicly traded equities. With partners like the KL Felicitas Foundation, the firm is known for its work encouraging transparency in impact portfolio performance.
Entrepreneurial Spark accelerates $188 million in follow-on funding. The 1,700 businesses that have been through the accelerator’s free programs at a dozen hubs in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales have attracted £151 million ($188 million) in additional investment and created 3,152 new jobs, according to the firm’s annual impact report. NatWest, KPMG Enterprise, Dell Technologies and Pinsent Masons support Entrepreneurial Spark to help make UK-based entrepreneurs “credible, backable and investable.” Entrepreneurial Spark plans to launch its 13th hub in London this year, along with a dedicated fintech accelerator in Scotland.
NewSchools Venture Fund dangles $1.5 million for special-edtech. The nonprofit “venture philanthropy” will make grants between $50,000 and $150,000 to for-profit and nonprofit startups developing technology to support K-12 students with learning disabilities. Previous NewSchools Ignite challenges focused on STEM education and English-language learning. NewSchools’ market research found significant edtech gaps for students with disabilities. Proposals are due by March 12.
#Signals: Ahead of the Curve
World Bank: Tap Islamic finance to achieve the SDGs. Global Islamic finance represents $1.9 trillion in assets, mostly in predominantly Muslim countries in Africa and Asia, where large numbers of people still live on less than $1.25 per day. That makes financial institutions rooted in Islamic principles an under-tapped resource for the $3 to $5 trillion per year needed to achieve “shared prosperity” and the U.N.’s 2030 global goals, according to the World Bank and Islamic Development Bank Group. Their new report also serves as a terrific primer on the topic. The principles of Islamic finance require “the just, fair, and equitable distribution of income and wealth,” primarily through asset-based financing of tangible assets and communal risk sharing (see, “What Can Islamic Finance Teach Impact Investors?”).
Does for-profit edtech serve the students that need it most? Venture capitalists have poured $2.3 billion into education technology startups since 2010. But most of the companies focus on already advantaged students. Shannon Farley of Fast Forward takes edtech investors to task for neglecting low-resource students. “The majority of paid products cannot reach the communities ripe for impact,” and are not designed with low-income kids or poor-infrastructure schools in mind, Farley writes. Nonprofits, such as LitLab, which offers a free digital reading library, may be better suited to do that. Last year, for-profit Duck Duck Moose was absorbed by the nonprofit Khan Academy – which made the company’s previously paid mobile games available for free.
#2030: Long-Termism
Two degrees of consequence. What will your city look like if the world fails to keep global warming below the two-degree Celsius increase agreed upon in the global climate agreement? Care to run the four-degree experiment? Perpetual Revolution, an exhibit at New York’s International Center of Photography, shows New York, Rio de Janeiro and other major cities today – and what they might look like with two and four degrees of warming. Spoiler alert: there’s a lot of water.
Sea levels already have risen eight inches in the last 140 years and could rise between two and seven feet more by 2100 if commitments to curbing global warming aren’t met, according to Climate Central. East Coast cities in the U.S. can expect to see two to three-times as many flooding incidents by 2030 and ten-times the number of tidal floods by 2045, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Such a soggy commute could get the attention of U.S. lawmakers. Without a dramatic change of course, Washington D.C. could experience more than one flood a day by 2045.
Onward! Please send any news and comments to editor@impactalpha.com.
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