BFA Global
At a Glance
Industry
Professional and Technical Services
Project Types
Engagement and Behavior Change, Financial Evaluation and Planning
Year
2023
Location
Boston, MA
Summary
Monica Charletta drove early-stage strategy building for the TECA venture launcher and designed a repository of climate adaptation-oriented financial services to drive innovation at the intersection of financial services and resilience for BFA Global.
Goals
BFA Global, an impact innovation firm based in Nairobi, Kenya, strives to improve financial inclusion and climate resilience in frontier markets. Ongoing projects such as the TECA venture launcher and the CIFAR Alliance’s Climate-Smart Innovation Hub promote innovation as a tool to build resilience in vulnerable communities and protect natural resources.
BFA enlisted the help of EDF Climate Corps Fellow, Monica Charletta, to support research, implementation, and stakeholder management activities for these projects.
Solutions
Monica supported BFA across two projects:
- Researching and fostering local innovation ecosystems for BFA’s climate venture launcher. Monica interviewed 15 experts for two upcoming programs across Africa and identified important opportunity areas for innovation within urban climate resilience, biodiversity, and rural livelihoods. A report she authored on urban climate resilience in Santiago will serve as a reference document for BFA’s partners and the incoming wave of entrepreneurs and investors.
- Building an AI-enabled gallery of climate-smart financial products in frontier markets. Monica researched, reviewed, and summarized over 100 climate-smart financial products and developed an MVP for user testing. Monica created a ChatGPT-enabled spreadsheet for faster summarization and streamlined the backend upload process to improve efficiency and reduce the risk of errors.
Potential Impact
Monica identified and interviewed prominent experts in target geographies to distill challenges and opportunities around improving urban climate resilience, biodiversity, and rural livelihoods. Findings will build partnerships and document areas for entrepreneurs to address through innovation.
Through the gallery of products, Monica illustrated areas receiving investment and areas where further funding is needed, with the goal of accelerating the development of resilience-building financial tools.
Monica also established replicable methodologies for seeding climate innovation ecosystems and processes for AI-powered market evaluation, offloading replicable tasks and allowing the team to focus on decision-making.