At the upcoming AGES, a joint interactive session on “Mobilising Investment for Forests and Sustainable Land Use in Africa” will be hosted by the UNEP Restoration Seed Capital Facility (RSCF), Partnerships for Forests (P4F) and the FMO’s Mobilising Finance for Forests (MFF) on Thursday, 26 February. For an exclusive preview, we jointly interviewed the following RSCF, P4F and MFF representatives:
Interview Summary:
Our RSCF, P4F and MFF experts highlight Africa’s strong potential for nature-positive growth, driven by valuable natural assets, expanding markets, and rising global demand for sustainable commodities such as cocoa, timber, and non-timber forest products. Despite this potential, early-stage finance gaps and limited investable pipelines constrain growth.
P4F addresses these challenges by incubating forest-friendly businesses, improving market access, and strengthening enabling conditions. RSCF accelerates investment by supporting fund managers and project developers, sharing early-stage costs, and reducing risk perceptions. MFF deploys flexible concessional capital, including equity, debt, grants, and technical assistance, to de-risk investments and scale viable projects.
The joint interactive session at AGES is significant because it brings together three complementary programmes spanning the full investment spectrum, offering practical insights into building and financing a strong pipeline of forest-positive businesses.
Feker: Hi everyone, my name is Feker Tadesse. I’m the Regional Director for the Partnerships for Forests programme (P4F) in East Africa based in Nairobi, Kenya. Over the past decade, I have led multiple nature positive incubators with the aim of mobilising investment into nature positive business models across Africa.
Fleur: Hello everyone, I am Fleur Brygo. I am an investment officer at FMO, working in the private equity department within the team that invests specifically in agribusiness, food and forestry. One of our key deployment focuses is Mobilising Finance for Forest (MFF), which is the source of funding that I will be speaking about at the conference. My background is in private equity and corporate finance in Africa, and I have been investing across FMO’s focus sectors, but with a special focus on forestry for the past year.
Martin: My name is Martin Halley. I work for the UN Environment Programme. I’ve been working in sustainable finance for nearly 15 years now, and now have the pleasure of managing the Restoration Seed Capital Facility aimed at accelerating investment in activities that contribute to forest restoration and protection.
Feker: Nature positive growth is a major investment opportunity in Africa because the continent combines really high-value natural assets, rapidly expanding markets, and this is complemented by a growing global demand for sustainable products. Yet the sector still faces a significant shortage of investable forest-positive businesses. At the same time, Africa’s tropical forest landscapes, offer really strong commercial potential from sustainable commodities like cocoa, timber, bamboo, cashews to more nascent but fast-growing markets for non-timber forest products.
These tropical forests, in addition to possessing significant commercial value, also support climate resilience and community livelihoods. But despite this potential, the sector faces persistent financing gaps and more importantly, a lack of early-stage investment. What this means practically is that many promising business models are not reaching scale. P4F sees nature positive growth as an investment opportunity because sustainable businesses can generate real economic value while protecting and regenerating tropical forests. This creates new value chains around standing forests, and resource degraded land and creates an opportunity for regenerative production.
P4F’s work has already shown that these models attract significant private capital. We have mobilised over $1.3 billion in investments to date and can deliver strong returns for investors, communities and landscapes. And so we believe that nature positive growth is not just an environmental priority or imperative, but it’s also a long-term commercial opportunity for investors looking to enter African markets and diversify portfolios with regenerative, future-proof value chains.
Fleur: Yes, I fully agree with everything that you said. And I think there is a need for capital across the nature value chain for companies at various stages, from innovative business models seeking to prove a concept to established businesses needing to scale to expand the boundaries of productivity. These companies are looking for aligned investors to enable them to generate sustainable and durable wealth while enhancing and protecting critical natural ecosystems, especially tropical forests, from degradation.
For investors, this is an opportunity to unlock growth beyond the continent’s underlying economic and demographic trends, but also through value adding activities, bringing these businesses into international markets that also were mentioned by Feker.
Martin: I think this this session is really going to be a fascinating one. It’s bringing together three programmes that are dedicated to boosting private sector activity and investment in forest restoration and protection across Africa and the rest of the tropical belt. I think together the three programmes cover the full spectrum from enterprise support all the way through to multi-million dollar investments in the sector. The session will provide practical insights into the investable pipeline in the sector, as well as practical information on the types of support and de-risking mechanisms that are available to companies and investors in the sector and in the region.
Martin: The Restoration Seed Capital Facility is really there to accelerate private investment into the activities that contribute to forest restoration and protection, specifically by overcoming bottlenecks that are currently slowing down private investment in the sector. We provide support to fund managers who are currently seeking to bring new investment vehicles to the market. This is still a very complex phase due to high risk perception in the sector generally and with respect to some of the geographies that we cover, notably Africa. Due to that risk perception, the time and resources required to bring new investment vehicles to market are often considerable. And our programme offers support to investment managers and fund managers who are going through that.
We also offer support to fund managers and project developers who are currently building the investable pipeline. And here again, there’s considerable work that needs to be done upfront to develop what are early-stage investment opportunities into full maturity, up to the point where an investment decision can be made, which takes a lot of time and resources. The Restoration Seed Capital Facility offers support to meet that need and that support really comes in the form of very practical cost sharing at the level of fund managers and project developers. Through all of this support, we help accelerate and de-risk investment that is crucial for the sector and crucial for investment in Africa.
Feker: P4F is tackling a fundamental market failure. There is strong demand for sustainable forest positive products. But too few investable businesses and enabling conditions to attract capital at scale. And because of this constraint, high potential solutions struggle to grow because early-stage businesses or enterprises lack finance, market access, technical support and enabling policies, leaving a large gap between commercial investor expectations and what a pipeline of local businesses can currently offer. To solve this, P4F mobilises investment by building the foundations of a healthy forest-positive economy, working on both the pipeline and the enabling environment. In our model, the first piece is around incubating forest friendly businesses. We develop early-stage enterprises that create economic value while at the same time protecting and regenerating forests.
A few examples of value chains that we’ve worked on are sustainable coffee, cocoa, timber, non-timber forest products, and what we call restorative value chains or business models that enhance the value of the standing forest. They create new supply chains and they generate significant income for communities.
We also work on addressing barriers that block investments into the sector We also work directly on tackling issues such as access to markets by engaging with off-takers. We work on smoothing out supply chain inefficiencies and other barriers that limit capital flow into African forest landscapes. And finally, we also work on creating the enabling conditions that investors need. So we support policy reforms. We help strengthen sustainable trade systems, and we also help improve market demand for responsibly sourced products. In combination, these create a more investment friendly environment for capital to flow.
Feker: These three programmes together, P4F, RSCF and MFF, form a capital continuum that helps forest businesses in Africa move from idea to incubation to early investment and finally to commercial scale. Each of them address different barriers along the investment journey.
Partnerships for Forests focuses on building and strengthening the pipeline. We work on early-stage incubation as well as creating an enabling environment for investment. We also address the foundational problem; there are too few investments ready forest positive businesses in tropical forest landscapes.
Through our incubation, we help to strengthen and scale these early-stage businesses. And we complement the other two programmes by incubating forest friendly business models through grants and technical assistance. We build enabling conditions like policy reforms, market access, sustainable supply chain developments and also strengthening local support ecosystems. And finally, we help reduce risks upstream so that later stage facilities like RSCF and MFF have stronger vetted pipelines to invest in.
Martin: I think the three programmes that we’ll be presenting together at this session are incredibly complementary. Partnership for Forests is a broad support programme that really helps to develop the opportunities from the ground up. The Restoration Seed Capital Facility works with those actors that are pooling together investment and bringing it to deploy in the sector and helping them overcome the barriers specific to that programme. That is complemented very well by the Mobilising Finance for Forest programme which is bringing capital to the sector directly. Through the three programmes you really get a full spectrum of support and investment into the sector from the early stages all the way to investment and counting also the enabling environment which Partnership for Forests supports. And so there’s a lot of complementarity and a shared objective across the three programmes to mobilise private sector and private finance for restoration and protection of natural forests.
Fleur: So Mobilising Finance for Forests offers a uniquely flexible model combining three types of concessional capital all directed at private sector investment. The first types are equity and concessional debt, which are used to de-risk sustainable land use investment and mobilise private finance in tropical forest regions through products such as first loss cover or debt guarantees.
The second type is development contributions, which are repayable grants provided to early-stage projects that are not yet sizable enough for an MFF investment, to support them becoming investable in the medium term. And the third type is technical assistance, which provides non-repayable grants for advisory services and learning and convening activities, helping companies address a wide spectrum of needs from ESG performance and impact measurement to business model innovation and operational improvement.
The three types of capital that MFF provides can be layered within the same investment either simultaneously or sequentially, allowing the capital to evolve with project maturity and risk profile, especially adapting to the needs and appetite of the broader investor landscape aiming to catalyse the maximum amount of private investment into the sector.
Images: provided by Partnerships for Forests (P4F)
Images: provided by Partnerships for Forests (P4F)
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