Blended finance for pioneering impact

The impact and risk appetite of our catalytic capital toolkit is part of our distinctive offer within the development finance community. We strive to develop new tools to achieve impact.

Our recently introduced ‘Kinetic Portfolio’ has been designed to enable us to invest and manage concessional investment strategies. It complements our existing Growth and Catalyst Portfolios and BII Plus technical assistance capabilities, ensuring we’re providing a comprehensive and flexible capital toolkit to help address our partners’ investment and development needs.

This new portfolio has a higher risk tolerance than our existing Growth and Catalyst investment strategies. It also has the ability to be blended with other forms of capital to enable it to be used to make pioneering investments. Through the portfolio, we’re able to use concessional capital in different ways to support our partners – ranging from funding to support them to close the ‘viability gap’ on projects, to flexible debt products.

We assess all Kinetic investments against the Enhanced Blended Concessional Finance Principles for Private Sector Projects developed by the DFI Working Group on Blended Concessional Finance for Private Sector Projects.

The first facility under our Kinetic Portfolio is a £240 million Climate Innovation Facility, introduced in 2021, which we’ve partnered on with FCDO.

It has a highly catalytic, climate-focused investment mandate that will enable us to test, seed and scale cutting-edge technologies, businesses or investment strategies that have the potential to have a transformational impact on the lives of people and communities in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

In 2024, the Prime Minister announced the introduction of an additional facility, focused on unlocking private capital for climate and sustainability-focused investments in emerging economies. You can read more here.