Vision 2030 Chairman Marc Watum unveiled the fund at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt last Wednesday.
The event took place in the European Pavilion during his speech on nature based solutions in Africa, titled 'The Business of Nature'.
During this unveiling, Marc Watum was joined on the EU 'Nature Positive Economy' panel by:
Dr. Thomas Andersson (President of International Organisation for Knowledge and Enterprise Development),
Dr. Monica Altamarino (Infrastructure and Climate Consultant at Water Equity),
Dr. Wenting Chen (Research Scientist at Norwegian Institute for Water Research)
Fabio Maria Montagnino (Head of Innovation at Cyprus Institute, Cambridge Fellow)
Malik Boukebbous (Area Manager for Egypt & Libya at Dredging International)
Chloe Treger (Urban Systems Designer & Researcher at Dark Matter Labs, Trees AI)
"In Africa, there’s an annual $500bn infrastructure gap that effects agriculture productivity challenges; primarily to do with irrigation" shared Marc Watum.
"However, of the 620 billion dollars, invested into startups around the world in 2017, only 0.7% of investment happened into Africa.
We are developing an index to help us identify what we call ‘innovation-dependent’ spheres of our food and water value chains.
We trace the inputs, processes, and outputs of the value chain, and reference their efficiencies to any agricultural product - a crop.
The result is a pin-point rating system that tells us exactly where in the value chain innovation is needed to make a positive outcome for people who depend on the crop."
The chairman also pledged to release a public version of this investment decision-making tool in November 2023.
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