LSE is delighted to announce the launch of a Blended Finance Lab as part of the new Initiative in Sustainable Finance (ISF) within the Global School of Sustainability.
Despite being recognised as an essential component of the transition towards a more sustainable future, the market for blended finance* is limited, with projects frequently of modest scale and highly bespoke. Analysis suggests a number of barriers prevent it from scaling: lack of investable deal flow; suboptimal use of blended finance tools by concessional investors; lack of a market place for interaction between public and private actors; and lack of institutional investors orientation towards this kind of investment.
The new LSE Blended Finance Lab aims to address these and other barriers with a view to scaling the blended finance marketplace, improving practices and education including case studies, growing the blended finance practitioner community and developing more investable opportunities.
LSE have appointed Harald Walkate and Robert van Zwieten as Senior Advisors on Blended Finance to help establish the Blended Finance Lab.
Tom Gosling, Professor in Practice and Director of the Sustainable Finance Initiative at LSE said, “The time for reports concluding we need to scale blended finance has passed. Instead, we need to identify the very practical issues and constraints that have prevented it scaling to date and then work to overcome them. The Blended Finance Lab will be a highly action-oriented initiative which provides a point of collaboration for market participants wanting to contribute to getting more private finance to where it needs to go.”
Harald Walkate and Robert van Zwieten, founding partners of Route17, said, “We’re delighted to be working with LSE on this important new project within the Initiative on Sustainable Finance. For blended finance to succeed requires bankable deals, effective use of development bank balance sheets, collaboration between public and private actors, and institutional investors willing to spend time and effort to learn how to invest in this area. This isn’t straightforward and we’re looking forward to establishing the Blended Finance Lab as an environment in which market actors can bring all of these components together successfully.”
For more information please contact Tom Gosling at t.gosling1@lse.ac.uk.
*Blended finance is the practice of deploying public or philanthropic capital to mobilize private capital. It is a critical tool in market development, scaling technologies and funding solutions to society’s challenges, such as financing the net zero transition or meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, especially in developing economies.
