Davos, Switzerland, 23 January 2020 – A coalition of public and private sector partners, including United Nations entities, non-governmental organizations and a private equity firm, launched yesterday SDG500 , a new investment platform to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting.
This US$ 500 million investment platform is the first-of-its-kind and will offer exposure to six different underlying funds, which will target businesses in the agriculture, energy, education, finance, and healthcare sectors across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean and Pacific regions. Each of these funds is or will be managed by Bamboo Capital Partners.
The underlying funds are: the ABC Fund, an impact investment vehicle targeting smallholder farmers and small and medium agribusinesses in developing countries; BUILD, a fixed income fund aimed at early stage enterprises in the Least Developed Countries; the CARE SheTrades Fund, a gender lens fund which will use debt and equity to invest in businesses in Asia; BLOC SmartAfrica and BLOC Latin America, venture capital funds targeting technology enterprises in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean respectively; and Health Access Leap (HEAL), a blended finance venture fund to support next generational healthtech solutions for TB and global health in emerging markets and high burden countries.
The Stop TB Partnership is a United Nations hosted agency committed to ending tuberculosis (TB), the leading infectious disease killer in the world, surpassing both HIV and malaria in combined annual deaths. The organization and its Accelerator for Impact (a4i) initiative will be the SDG500 partner for the HEAL fund.
The underlying funds will use debt and equity to invest at Seed, Series A and Series B stages in hundreds of businesses in emerging and frontier markets, and aims to address the ‘missing middle’ financing gap that affects entrepreneurs in these markets, where growth is constrained by a lack of access to follow-on financing.
There will be a catalytic first loss layer for the underlying funds designed to encourage and protect senior tranches of funding. Initial sponsors of the first loss layers include the European Union, the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States, the Governments of Luxembourg, Togo and Tunisia, CARE and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.
The financing gap to achieve the SDGs in developing countries is estimated to be US$ 2.5 trillion per year. To achieve these goals by 2030, more innovative and sustainable financing solutions are required.
https://mailchi.mp/stoptb.org/sdg500-wef-stp-2020-830723?e=ec2a0f28ec