Our Story
As friends and colleagues of many years, we are united in our ambition to help build a more sustainable, equitable future and solve the climate crisis. In early 2018, we began a conversation on how best to utilise our 35 years of combined experience in the sector. Just over two years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we saw climate and sustainable finance as having reached an inflection point: investment by the world’s largest multilateral development banks (MDBs) had risen to record levels, the EU Commission had put in place a sustainable finance action plan, and private investment saw renewable energy capacity continue to grow at a record pace.
However, these efforts were really only scratching the surface. To unlock the trillions of $ of necessary financial flows, more information about conditions on the ground and the effectiveness of investments aligned with climate action and sustainable development was and is needed. Yet little centralised, standardised and reliable data for developing and transition economies currently exists and what does exist is often difficult to access. We decided to set out and fill this gap by building an innovative database that tracks investment and impacts, maps challenges to climate and sustainable finance, and aligns them with solutions.
Sufinda was incorporated in London in December 2018 as a community interest company (C.I.C.), a UK corporate structure where a not-for-profit operates for the benefit of its membership and/or audience. In our case this means the global community of climate and sustainable finance researchers, decision makers and investors. In early 2019, SOAS University of London created the Centre for Sustainable Finance which acts as academic host for the Climate and Sustainable Finance Data Initiative.
Felicia and Harald