Climate change impacts are likely to send more than 130 million into extreme poverty by 2030. Africa, Latin America, and South Asia are among the most vulnerable regions, where natural disasters, food insecurity, and health hazards are already exacerbating the vulnerability of local communities. There is on urgent need to buildclimate resilience among households and communities vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Startup innovators ore at the forefront of creating the tools and services people need to manage disasters, adopt their assets and livelihoods, and build long-term resilience, They ore collecting data on disaster risk, launching insurance products, crafting regenerative agricultural models, and designing ways to access carboncredit markets.
As promising and impoctful as these innovations ore, they struggle with many of the challenges that face early-stage ventures: funding, talent, customer acquisition, partnerships, and more. At the heart of these challenges Is a commontheme: the difficulty of creating monetizable, commercial models that ore scalable with venture funds.
Fortunately, !he last decade hosshown us that fintech can enable greater accessibility and affordability of products for underserved, last mile populations, leveraging digital payments, satellite data, online marketplaces, and embedded finance infrastructure lo bring down costs. deliver access for low-income populations, and drive scalability of business models. Such achievements explain why investments in fintech companies increased from nine billion in 2010 lo over 220 billion in 2Q21.