Climate Tech Facility — Ecosystem Insights

Published in

Mercy Corps Ventures

4 min readJan 22, 2024

In this blog, we provide an overview of the climate tech landscape in emerging markets. These findings are based on 412 proposals received from our inaugural Climate Tech Facility, providing unique insights to builders, funders, and others working on climate-smart solutions in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

In brief

Mercy Corps Ventures’ Climate Tech Facility received 412 pilot applications from across 50+ countries. We see our Climate Tech Facility as a “state of the market” for climate innovation — as we are sampling early-stage climate innovators globally in emerging markets, understanding what solutions are being tested, what user groups are being targeted for products and services, and what opportunities are being explored.

In our 2023 call for proposals, it is clear that we are still in the beginning stages of the emergence of the innovation ecosystem. There is still a dominant focus on smallholder farmers and climate tech applications in the farming and food systems sector — while this is a critical sector and focus for climate impact, in the future we believe that climate tech innovation will expand much farther outside of agriculture and food systems. Additionally, the most common technologies being applied and tested are those that have existed for many years — for example, solar mini-grids came up in a number of applications and while they are a powerful tool to boost electricity access to unconnected communities, they have been in deployment since the 1980s in some form or another.

As our Venture Lab navigates the cutting-edge of innovative tech solutions for underserved populations in emerging markets, we hope to identify the next frontier of climate resilient technology. We look forward to announcing the selected partners from our Climate Tech Facility in the weeks to come.

Top climate technologies and keywords

◦ IoT (22%), renewables (18%), satellite (15%) and blockchain (13%) are the top trending technologies

◦ Farmers (66%), platforms (58%), water (44%), finance (34%) and soil (30%) are the top trending keywords

MCV Thesis Alignment:

◦ 86% of proposals for Adaptive Ag & Food Systems and Climate Smart Tech; 14% working on Inclusive Fintech

Relatively, Africa had more applicants focused on Agriculture & Food Systems compared to Asia and LatAm, which were more focused on Climate Smart Technologies

◦ Top sub-theses: Supply Chains, Distribution & Infrastructure, Nature-Based Solutions and Precision Ag

Geography:

◦ 75% of proposals are to be implemented in Africa; remainder are split evenly between Asia and LatAm

53 countries are represented; 29 countries had 3+ applications
In order, Kenya, Nigeria, India, Ghana, Uganda and Colombia had the highest applicant volume

Priority populations to serve:

◦ Top-5 priority populations include low-income users, women, smallholder farmers, youth and MSMEs

Applicant profiles:

◦ 77% of organizations are relatively early-stage (pre-seed or before), with 71% raising less than $500k thus far

◦ 60% of applicants are launching new products (< 100 users), while 21% have 1000+ users already

“We’re inspired by the incredible response from local entrepreneurs across the globe to the Climate Tech Facility. Climate change is disproportionately affecting communities in emerging markets, and homegrown climate-smart technologies will play a crucial role in addressing the crisis. The technological and thematic diversity from the 400+ proposals across 53 countries is encouraging, as there will be no one-size-fits-all solution. The innovation and thoughtfulness of the entrepreneurial community charts the course to a climate-resilient future.”
Scott Onder, Managing Director, Mercy Corps Ventures

In September 2023, Mercy Corps Ventures launched its inaugural Climate Tech Facility. The objective is to deploy innovative technologies for climate resilience in emerging markets through a series of pilots. The Climate Tech Facility will provide equity-free grants of up to $100,000, as well as mentorship, impact measurement advisory, access to partnership opportunities, knowledge exchange, and brand exposure.

The call for proposals brought over 400 applications each leveraging a variety of climate-smart technologies.

The top trending technologies include: