The Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI) at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and Convergence, the global network for blended finance, announced their academic partnership to advance their mutual goals of enhancing blended finance research, practice, and impact.
The mitigation of climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, and other grand societal challenges has historically been primarily financed through public funding and private philanthropic giving. Yet, a large financing gap remains, especially in the Global South. Hence, the question is: how can more private capital be crowded in to finance innovative solutions in climate tech, renewable energy, nature-based solutions, social inclusion, and others, especially in the Global South where capital is most needed? Blended finance—the use of public and philanthropic funding to crowd in private capital—is a potential way to finance a more sustainable world. While blended finance holds the promise of being catalytic in mobilizing vast amounts of private capital, advancing academic scholarship and knowledge-sharing, transparency, and capacity building are critical to achieving this goal.
The partnership between Convergence and SIRI aims to do precisely that. Building on their respective existing efforts, the SIRI-Convergence Partnership aims to foster academic research, advance data collection and transparency, provide knowledge-sharing and research-informed educational training and capacity building, and engage and cultivate a global consortium of blended finance academics, particularly from the Global South. This partnership pursues multiple objectives to advance their mutual goals of enhancing blended finance research, practice, and impact:
- Fostering rigorous academic research on blended finance to advance academic knowledge and, importantly, providing a research-informed foundation for developing a robust learning agenda that will provide guidance for practice. Moreover, SIRI and Convergence aim to create an ecosystem that supports the growth of scholarly research in blended finance, particularly with regard to the Global South. This includes the fostering of blended finance scholarship on the Global South as well as the fostering of blended finance scholars from the Global South.
- Complementing existing efforts aimed at improving data collection, transparency, and knowledge-sharing in blended finance, and contributing to the broader ecosystem of data and knowledge.
- Developing and offering certification programs to blended finance professionals and hereby support capacity building among professionals. These programs will incorporate insights from academic research as well as draw from best practice in blended finance.
Both Nnamdi Igbokwe Ph.D. (Director of Knowledge and Thought Leadership at Convergence) and Caroline Flammer Ph.D. (Founding Director of SIRI, A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics, and SIPA’s Vice Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs) are thrilled about this partnership and highlight its significance to both Convergence and SIRI. They look forward to jointly driving these efforts forward.
About the Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI):
The mission of the Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI) at Columbia SIPA is to foster scholarship, education, and dialogue on system-level investing. SIRI’s activities focus on the development of better measures to track progress toward the mitigation of system-level challenges; the fostering of rigorous academic scholarship on system-level investing; improving dialogue by convening and hosting leaders from academia, policy, the public and private sector; the development of new courses and extracurricular activities to educate the next generation of leaders in policy, investment, and business; and executive education to educate the current generation of leaders. These pillars aim to complement, inform, and mutually reinforce each other.
Blended Finance is one of SIRI’s core focus areas. With the support of sponsors Mirova and SIMFO, SIRI recently announced the launch of a major research and programming initiative at SIPA that will help develop and scale up the global marketplace for blended finance and catalytic capital. To learn more, read the announcement here and visit SIRI’s Blended Finance Website.
About Convergence:
Convergence is the global network for blended finance. We exist to increase private investment in emerging markets and developing economies to advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Agreement.
Our members include private investors looking to diversify their portfolios, businesses seeking capital, as well as public agencies and philanthropic foundations looking to make their funds go further. We offer this community exclusive access to original market intelligence and knowledge products (such as case studies, data analyses, and online and in-person training), networking events, and more. To accelerate advances in the field, Convergence also provides grants for the design of vehicles that could attract private capital to global development at scale.
