Green Outcomes Fund

In January 2020, the Bertha Centre launched the Green Outcomes Fund (GOF) in collaboration with GreenCape and the World Wide Fund for Nature South Africa (WWF-SA). The GOF is a brainchild of the Bertha Centre and seeded through a design-thinking process with GreenCape, WWF-SA, and the World Bank Group.

The GOF, implemented in partnership with the Jobs Fund, is a first of its kind structure which incentivises South African fund managers to increase investment in green Small, Medium and Micro-sized Enterprises (SMMEs) by paying for green outcomes that are generated. These outcomes include green job creation, climate mitigation, and improved water and waste management.

Local fund managers who might have overlooked green SMMEs in the past are now incentivised to invest in small green businesses because they receive payments for their portfolio of green outcomes generated. This is beneficial to green SMMEs, who are now able to access funding and non-financial support. Fund managers gain through outcomes payments, which are used to assist their investment process in green SMMEs. Part of the GOF’s aim is to create a common base for growing the South African green impact investing market. This has been made possible by catalytic grant support from the RMB Fund, a division of the FirstRand Foundation.

Public and concessional capital will remain a key priority to catalyse broader private sector finance into the South African green SMME economy optimally. Read the report "Pioneering a Climate Finance Instrument in Africa: Lessons from Two Years of the Green Outcomes Fund" here.