The question
Multilateral climate funds hold public money that governments have set aside for climate action. Part of their mandate is to use it so that private capital follows: by taking risk, lending on soft terms or guaranteeing others' loans. Agriculture is one of the sectors where they are expected to do this, and one where private capital has been slow to arrive.
How the funds go about it is not well documented. Fund reporting on private finance mobilised is not broken down by sector, and studies of blended finance rely on databases that classify deals by their own rules. For the agricultural portfolios of the GCF and its peers there is no established account of how blended projects are designed, who carries them out, and how their results are tracked.
Scope
The project is exploratory. It follows the life of blended agricultural projects in the main multilateral climate funds, the GCF, the GEF, the Adaptation Fund and the Climate Investment Funds, through three stages.
Design: which instruments are used, how concessional and commercial money are layered, what the fund's contribution is meant to unlock, and who proposes the structure.
Implementation: through whom the money reaches the sector, on what terms it arrives at the end borrower, and how the arrangement changes between approval and disbursement.
Monitoring: what the fund asks its partners to report, how results for a portfolio of loans or investments are estimated, and how they are verified.
The material is the funds' own documents and open data, read with the text classification methods developed under the NLP project, and a small number of projects examined in detail.