2004 Forum Report: Financing Technologies for the Environment
Financing Technologies for Mitigating Environmental Impact
Facilitated by Chris Eyre, Legacy Venture
Environmental Defense (Tech Award Laureate) - Looks for "corporate partnerships to find solutions" - if there is a financial return others will follow. For example, Fed-Ex's hydroelectric delivery truck initiative.
Los Alamos National Labs, (Tech Award Laureate) - How to tap into and get around IP rights issues at national labs? Too many marketable double and triple bottom line solutions are locked in these laboratories across America with no clear way to spin them off and commercialize.
A pronounced lack of unrestricted capital available in the nonprofit community funding market to hire, capacity build, and reinvest to enable expansion/scale. Resulting in:
- Heavy burnout rate in the sector
- Funding strings prevent innovation
- Limited social and environmental impact
- New ideas are continually funded but proven solutions are not replicated and mediocre organizations are perpetuated
How to create healthy natural selection in the sector? Need for an objective Morning Star equivalent to rate nonprofit organizations and foundations working in varied and complex areas most of which are not easily compared.
There is a knowledge and resource gap between the research institutions & private sector. It is not clear that nonprofits can fill it.
Open Space Sessions: Capacity Building in the Developing World: A Next Generation of Leaders
Facilitated by Jeff Hamaoui, Origo Social Enterprise Partner and Laetitia Mailhes, Les Echos
Capacity Building Issue Synopsis
Often the focus on funding of technology does not take into account that the 'human interface' between technology and positive environmental impacts is not sufficiently trained in the use of that technology to deliver the required results.
Even when proper training is provided at the local level there are some key challenges to fostering an effective in-country capacity building leadership:
- Brain drain - Well-trained instructors will often migrate to the private sector or find opportunities outside of the very communities they trained to serve.
- Leadership and empowerment: Ensuring local leaders assume responsibility for capacity building and establishing an empowerment process that allows them to do so.
- Developing relevant curricula: Often, training provided and developed in the global north bears little relevance on local contexts and needs.
- Finding the market: Targeting cross sector clients for capacity building services; aligning activities to deliver value across sectors and activity sets and generate sufficient revenues to make capacity building programs VALUABLE and VIABLE.
Capacity Building Needs
- Capital: Accessing international funds and resources for capacity building, understanding the needs of those differing funds and communicating effectively to those funds
- Network: Network, information and communications channels for capacity building organizations to work through.
- Infrastructure: Two very similar points, finding the infrastructure to "fail forwards" for capacity building organizations and finding ways of making information provided 'operational'.
- Metrics: Creating 'value metrics' that reflect local, and not donor, values.
Capacity Building: Ways Forward
- Allow capacity to be bought by the customer: provide a blend between guided capacity building services and needs driven capacity building determined by customers themselves.
- Ensure capacity building throughout project lifecycle.
- Create a map of available resources.
