TORONTO | October 14, 2022 ––The Investor Leadership Network (ILN) is pleased to share that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is supporting the ILN’s leadership in sustainable finance with a grant. These resources will allow the ILN to further its leadership on mobilizing private capital to support the energy transition and the development of green, sustainable and regenerative economies in emerging markets and developing countries.
Estimates suggest that reaching the world’s climate goals requires between $3 trillion and $6 trillion in financing annually through 2050. The International Monetary Fund says that currently, only $630 billion is being mobilized annually and the proportion of that going to developing countries is low. In the 2022 Goalkeepers Report, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found that nearly every indicator shows the UN Sustainable Development Goals are off track.
The ILN believes that institutional investors have a crucial role to play in overcoming these challenges, with the co-benefit of unlocking expanded deal flow and fund growth. In particular, blended finance – the strategic deployment of concessional, development or grant finance for the mobilization of private finance towards sustainable development in developing countries – is a critical instrument to help close this gap and should therefore be scaled rapidly. Last year, the ILN released its Blended Finance Blueprint outlining several specific actions governments and investors should take to scale blended finance.
With the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the ILN will continue to encourage greater use of blended finance on several fronts, including:
- Engaging with emerging markets and developing countries to drive a just transition and an equitable development finance ecosystem that prioritizes the long-term well-being and growth trajectory of the developing world;
- Engaging with high income country governments to commit to creating enabling environments in which private capital, especially capital held by institutional investors, is able to make investments at scale in developing countries
- Engaging with high income country governments to increase official development assistance, with a maintained focus on human capital financing;
- Engaging with partners across the development finance system to identify novel and innovative solutions; and
- Working at the nexus of public, private and philanthropic capital to support development and financing of projects that will help the world achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Amy Hepburn, CEO of the ILN, said, “ILN is honored by the Gates Foundation’s recognition of our global leadership in sustainable finance. We look forward to leveraging our collective capabilities to catalyze investments alongside the SDGs.”