Published: 11 Mar 2026

Dear IFI Community

One of the things I love about this community is watching the field mature: not through a single breakthrough, but through dozens of practitioners across geographies and disciplines each doing a piece of the work. Building instruments. Questioning assumptions. Mapping risks. Imagining new forms of ownership.

 

This month's showcase is a perfect example. Research quantifying climate adaptation investment gaps in East Africa.Thoughts on what pension funds could look like in a post-growth economy. A platform designed to turn networking between climate investors into genuine coordination. Each one different, but all building with real intention.

 

And this month, we also have an urgent ask. If steward ownership is part of your practice (or even just your thinking) please read Section 4 carefully. There's a narrow window to act, and your voice genuinely matters.

 

 

2 Market Infrastructure & Collaboration: See what 60 Decibels and Bridges have been up to 

1. Voices from the Field

This piece applies Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) to impact investing, examining why capital persists at the margins even when the intent to reach real change clearly exists. Rather than stopping at diagnosis, each layer of the analysis surfaces concrete intervention points - from information asymmetries disadvantaging emerging market entrepreneurs, to fiduciary norms that treat sustainability as optional, to worldview biases that structurally exclude nonprofits driving scalable change in emerging economies. A rigorous and actionable read for those working on the architecture of change, not just its rhetoric.

🔗 Read the full piece

East and Central Africa's infrastructure, energy, and manufacturing sectors face mounting climate risk - with flood damage, heat stress, and coastal erosion projected to reduce Kenya's GDP by 3.6–7.3% by 2050, and Tanzania's by up to 4%. Yet private sector investment in adaptation remains far below what's needed. GCA's live market study is developing investment briefs across four adaptation opportunities - adaptation home upgrades (Tanzania), mini-grids powered by renewables (Zambia), climate-friendly cooling for manufacturers (Tanzania), and mangrove restoration (Kenya). The study uses rapid climate risk assessments and quantified ROI analysis to provide actionable guidance for commercial banks and private investors in the region.

🔗 Follow the project

 

What happens to retirement savings if our economies can no longer grow indefinitely? Arketa Institute's new report confronts this underexplored question head-on, laying out the risks facing pension funds in a growth-constrained world and proposing a more holistic, multi-capital approach to providing for wellbeing in old age. A recording of the webinar presenting key findings - moderated by Gaya Herrington, author of the 2020 update of the Limits to Growth report - is also available. For those thinking about long-term institutional capital and systemic financial resilience, this is a substantive contribution to an urgent conversation.

🔗 Read the report and access the webinar recording

2. Market Infrastructure & Collaboration

60 Decibels, the impact measurement company spun out of Acumen, has released an open-access interactive map tracking how impact capital flows across 8,000+ funders and companies globally. Built on the world's largest social performance database - drawing on over 600 impact studies and hundreds of thousands of direct interviews across 70+ countries - it's designed to surface not just who the players are, but how capital moves between them and where it concentrates or fails to reach. It's self-reported and non-exhaustive, but growing: any organisation in the ecosystem can add or update their entry, making it a living, community-maintained resource. Worth exploring whether you're an allocator looking for new connections, a researcher mapping the field, or just someone who's been trying to draw this on a whiteboard for years.

🔗 Explore the map

 

One of the persistent frustrations in blended finance is the gap between intent and execution - investors who want to co-invest or collaborate, but find incentive misalignments making it difficult in practice. Bridges is a platform designed to close exactly that gap, providing structured collaboration infrastructure for CVCs, VCs, and family offices investing in climate. Through curated gatherings, ongoing peer groups, and jointly-commissioned research, Bridges creates the conditions for capital providers to move from networking to genuine coordination. They are actively looking to connect with family offices, foundations, and fund managers. A timely piece of market infrastructure for the climate capital ecosystem.

🔗 Connect with Bridges via email

3. Opportunities & Field-Building

Deep tech ventures - in biotech, quantum, space, green energy and beyond - face a stubborn structural paradox: publicly-funded research struggles to emerge from university labs, while private capital tends to prioritise rapid returns over public good. The founders and researchers most committed to staying mission-aligned are often the ones least well served by existing capital structures.

A new ESRC-funded PhD at the University of Glasgow, co-supervised by Gemma Milne and Professor Jillian Gordon, is taking this problem seriously - asking whether alternative and social finance models (impact investing, venture philanthropy, blended finance, emerging debt structures) can be genuinely adapted to support mission-centric deep tech in moving from lab to market. What makes this studentship particularly exciting for the IFI community: it is developed in partnership with our own head of Learning, Esme Verity, meaning the successful candidate will have direct access to practitioners, founders, and funders shaping this space - not just the academic literature.

The application deadline is 24 March 2026, 5pm GMT. If you know someone working at the intersection of finance, impact, and emerging technology - in academia, a foundation, an impact fund, or a deep tech venture - please share this with them.

4. Take Action: Keep Steward Ownership in the EU's 28th Regime

Steward ownership has been gaining real traction across the EU - but it's now at risk of being left out of one of the most consequential policy frameworks in years. The EU is building a 28th Regime: a single cross-border legal form designed to make it easier for startups and scaleups to operate across all 27 member states under one common policy. If steward ownership isn't included in that architecture from the start, retrofitting it later will be significantly harder. Purpose Foundation has put together a clear explainer on what's at stake and why the window is narrow. We need investors specifically to sign and circulate a letter to Ursula von der Leyen, making the case for inclusion of a standardised European mezzanine investment instrument and optional elements of steward ownership in the EU Inc. Friday the 13th is the deadline. Please don't let it slip.

🔗 Sign the letter here

Thank you, as always, for continuing to share your thinking, your experiments, and your openness with the community. The more we illuminate what's being tested and built across the ecosystem, the more the field can mature - together.

Chat soon,

Aunnie & The IFI Team

P.S If you missed our February Showcase mailer, you can find the open link here