Strive Community Innovation Fund: Environmental Sustainability

Today, Strive Community launches its second Innovation Fund. Up to $1 million is available for digital and data-first solutions that support the growth of small businesses with fewer than 10 employees. Building on the success of our first fund, the objective of this round is to pilot and learn from innovations in two focus areas: Environmental Sustainability and Data for Market Access.

Successful applications will each receive up to $150,000 to develop and test their solutions over a 12- to 18-month period. The Fund is open for applications until May 26, 2023. Visit our website for more information on what we’re looking for and how to apply.

This blog is one of two that will explore our priority topics and their applicability to small businesses. Here, we focus on Environmental Sustainability. To read about our interest in Data for Market Access, click here.

Driving positive impact for small businesses and the environment

Climate change is the most pressing and defining challenge of our time. The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are already increasing and causing widespread disruption. The last year has seen a record-high 40.3°C in the UK, famine-inducing droughts in East Africa, Pakistan floods impacting 16 million children, and record-breaking blizzards in California.

If the target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees is not met, scientists predict irreversible and catastrophic consequences to the natural systems upon which human life depends. This means there’s an urgent need to test new ideas and scale socially inclusive innovations that minimize our impact on the planet and support communities that are already — or will become — impacted by climate change. For Strive Community, environmental sustainability involves supporting solutions that do just this while delivering growth for small businesses.

The role for small businesses

While there are an increasing number of donor and corporate initiatives supporting environmental sustainability efforts, these mostly back solutions focused on consumers or smallholder farmers. Businesses with fewer than 10 employees are largely missing from the dialogue, yet they offer a wealth of dynamism and possibility. This is even more true in the context of environmental sustainability, which necessitates the sort of grassroots innovation and community embeddedness found in these enterprises.

We recognize environmental sustainability is a relatively nascent topic for the small business sector. That’s why, through building and funding solutions, we hope to develop a global evidence base on the impact of environmentally sustainable practices for and by small businesses. We are open to a wide variety of solutions, although expect proposals to fall into one of three recognized categories for climate action: mitigation, adaptation, or resilience.

• Mitigation focuses on reducing and avoiding greenhouse gas emissions, e.g., via clean energy innovation or circular economy practices.
• Adaptation centers on adjusting to actual or expected changes brought about by climate change, e.g., restoring mangroves to act as a buffer against storm surges.
• Resilience is about increasing the capacity to anticipate, absorb, and recover from climate-orientated shocks, e.g., improving waste management systems or providing insurance for climate-induced shocks.

Small businesses play critical roles in our economies and in the climate struggle, yet have limited capacity for change and high vulnerability to shocks. This is especially true for those working within global value chains, who highlight the significant disruption caused by more severe and less predictable weather. Therefore, solutions must not further burden these businesses; rather, they should contribute to their growth. This could involve enterprises expanding existing climate-focused activities or adopting practices relevant to their core business model that produce environmental benefits as a secondary outcome. Proposals must also be digital or data-first and have a clear route to reaching micro-entrepreneurs and small businesses at scale.

Indicative solutions could include (but are not limited to):

• Online marketplaces for artisans to sell responsibly sourced and manufactured products while promoting secondhand or repaired goods.
• Digitized agent network models supporting micro-entrepreneurs to sell clean energy products.
• Food delivery platforms supporting small restaurants with zero-waste practices and reverse logistics to compost kitchen waste.
• Platforms that digitize and integrate informal scrap-shops and their waste-pickers into formal waste management systems.

To summarize, we are seeking to fund digital-first solutions that support the growth and financial resilience of small businesses while making a positive environmental impact. We are looking for:

• New products, features, services, and business models, not scaling-up business-as-usual solutions (unless extending an existing solution to MSEs) and excluding the development of training content.
• Organizations with an existing track record of working with small businesses, not entirely new entities.
• Solutions that have potential to impact small businesses at scale, not those which are highly sector or market specific.
• This Fund will not support solutions focussed on smallholder farmers, but will fund initiatives that support small businesses working in the agricultural sector.

Visit our website for more information on Strive Community and the Innovation Fund, including how to apply, along with eligibility and selection criteria. Applications close on May 26, 2023.