UNICEF provides early-stage funding and support to frontier technology solutions that benefit children and the world
The UNICEF Innovation Fund has made investments in open-source solutions that have the potential to improve the lives of children. The Innovation Fund invests in technology start-ups from new and emerging markets and will continue to grow its portfolio. UNICEF Country Offices have also received investment leveraging significant co-funding from other sources.
The Innovation Fund has made investments in 130 frontier technology solutions that have the potential to create a positive change for humanity.
UNICEF’s Innovation Fund invests in early-stage, open-source, emerging technology digital public goods with the potential to impact children on a global scale. It also provides product and technology assistance, support with business growth, and access to a network of experts and partners to allow for scale and growth. Our ambition is to build successful digital solutions into Global Digital Public Goods, to ensure fair, equitable, and open access to these unique and new tools for human development on a global scale.
The UNICEF Innovation Fund is the first financial vehicle of its kind in the United Nations and enables UNICEF to learn from and to shape markets of emerging technology that exist at the intersection of $100 billion business markets and 1 billion persons’ needs.
Founded in 2016, the core motivation of the Innovation Fund is to identify “clusters” or portfolios of initiatives around emerging technology – so that UNICEF can both shape markets and also learn about and guide these technologies to benefit children. We invest in digital public goods that can impact the lives of vulnerable populations.
UNICEF finds these solutions clustered around $100 billion industries in frontier technology spaces, such as blockchain, drones, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, extended reality and others.
UNICEF philosophy Open source Investors Collaborators
Open source
The Innovation Fund invests exclusively in open-source solutions. The Fund generates value by building open-source IP and scalable digital public goods, strengthening communities of problem solvers, and growing solutions that bring results for children and the world.
Aquity free
The Innovation Fund provides value that can be measured and counted in real time. We recognise it’s much less important to see direct (and individual) cash flow – and much more important to see communities of problem solvers creating global digital public goods that can be repurposed, adapted, and scaled across a wide range of partners’ needs. We achieve this by gaining access to open-source intellectual property and the communities we are creating around the products we invest in.
Smart Investing
Smart Investing
The Fund launched the Smart Investing initiative to invest in a diverse portfolio of startups from 2019 onwards. Through Smart Investing, we commit to improving diversity so that half of the new portfolio of startups companies we bring in every year have a female lead. In the longer term, our goal is to grow the share of female-led companies in our overall portfolio from 30% to 50%.
Impact
The Fund monitors the progress of each investment in real time. We measure progress on two different levels. First, aggregated metrics for all portfolio companies tracking the sustainability of the business and the technology developed. Second, the social impact which is specific to the context and the type of solution that the startup is building.
IFIA members can encourage innovators to apply this fund
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