Grace Ashiru
If your firm uses cutting-edge technology for climate action, such as drones, blockchain, extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), or unique data science (DS) then the UNICEF Funding Opportunity for Climate Startups is for you.
Benefits
From the UNICEF Venture Fund, early-stage startups can get investments of up to $100,000 without giving up any equity.
The funds are intended for for-profit technological firms with the potential to solve climate change.
Eligibility
Apply if your product has been registered in one of UNICEF’s program countries, is a working prototype, has shown results, and is (or could be) licensed under an open-source license.
The Venture Fund is especially interested in ideas that:
- Are optimized for places with few resources (e.g., low connectivity, mobile access).
- Address obstacles to improving outcomes for children.
- Focus on reducing inequality instead of making it worse.
- Can communicate in many languages, even smaller ones.
The Challenge
Children and young people worldwide are most at risk from climate change.UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Index shows that 1 billion children, or almost half of the world’s child population, are at “extremely high risk” of the harmful effects of climate change.
These children are more likely exposed to more frequent, intense, and destructive climate hazards like air pollution, water shortages, heatwaves, vector-borne diseases, cyclones, and river and coastal flooding.
Over 850 million of these children are exposed to four or more climate stresses, which puts their futures in danger and makes it very hard for them to live, play, and grow.
Also, the lives and well-being of the nearly 4 billion children born worldwide will be increasingly threatened in the next 30 years.
Even though reducing and removing global emissions is the only long-term solution to the climate crisis, investing heavily in climate adaptation and resilience measures can be the most effective way to reduce children’s overall climate risk and the loss and damage caused by climate change and to make children and their communities more resilient to current and future shocks.
For example, investing in better access to resilient water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services and health and nutrition services can greatly reduce the overall climate risk for 415 million and 460 million children, respectively.
To protect children, communities, and the most vulnerable from the worst effects of a climate that is already changing, important services like water, sanitation, and hygiene systems, as well as health and education services, must be changed.
UNICEF’s Venture Fund looks into new technologies in their early stages that could help children and young people.
Through 9 thematic portfolios, the Office of Innovation focuses on the most challenging problems UNICEF is trying to solve for and with children and young people.
Through this call for proposals, the organization is looking for cutting-edge tech solutions that can help solve problems in areas like climate change, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), youth, and humanitarian issues.
These portfolio areas, among others, prioritize solutions that improve service delivery and policies, give young people more power and help them get involved, and ensure that all children have the same access to essential services.
How to apply
Click here before the deadline on Monday, January 9, 2023, for more details and to apply for UNICEF’s funding opportunity for startups working on climate change.
