SAFFAL: A Blended Finance Platform Boosting Women-led Climate SMEs in South Asia
19 October 2026
A new blended finance initiative is aiming to channel capital towards women-led climate ventures in South Asia, combining accelerator support with a structured finance facility.
The South Asia Finance Facility for Acceleration and Leverage, or SAFFAL, is a climate accelerator and investment-ready finance platform backed by the Massive Earth Foundation. It is delivered under the EmPower: Women for Climate-Resilient Societies programme, Phase 2, in partnership with UNEP and UN Women.
SAFFAL combines a 12-week accelerator program with a US$6 million blended finance facility.
The objective is to help women-led enterprises focused on climate action. These are registered ventures in carbon removal, renewable energy, fuel switching, waste management, and agri-tech, across India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.
A 12-Week Bootcamp, Plus Blended Finance
SAFFAL's bootcamp starts with intensive coaching, then brings participants to a Demo Day in front of investors. A key component is the blended finance "toolkit" that extends to 20 selected enterprises via a combination of grant, debt, equity, and catalytic capital.
Blended finance is a way of combining public or concessional capital with commercial or private capital, typically to expand lending to underserved borrowers. Often, it is structured as a guarantee facility, placing the public funding between the traditional lenders and the borrowers.
Announced in January 2023, EmPower covers Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Viet Nam. Also called "Strengthening Women's Leadership and Effectiveness in Climate Change Resilience in Asia", the flagship UN programme is run by UNEP, UN Women and regional development partners. It runs for five years, aiming to systematically promote climate action through the leadership of women and girls.
Closing a Gender Gap in Climate Finance
The rationale for a platform like SAFFAL is clear: a financing gap for women-led SMEs, combined with a structural need for climate adaptation and mitigation.
UN Women's analysis tracked over $6 trillion in venture capital funds globally between 2012 and 2019, but only about $1.3 trillion reached women-owned businesses. Women-led businesses see around 2% of venture capital investment globally. The findings show that women's businesses tend to focus on sectors such as sustainability, education, and community development - fields that attract less funding. As a result, access to early-stage financing is particularly hard for women entrepreneurs.
The US government's International Development Finance Corporation, or DFC, has stated that its research suggests female-led enterprises are less likely to default - and in fact have higher returns over time - than other SMEs. The gap in financing, then, amounts to a lost opportunity for economies.
A policy note published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) also argues that SMEs will need more than $2.5 trillion in financing to meet the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through 2030. It identifies gender-lens finance and blended finance as two critical tools to help close the gap.
There are other examples of blended finance facilities structured to back climate and gender focus. In 2019, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) announced a financing package of up to US$150 million for Southeast Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank (SeABank), one of the largest private banks in Vietnam. The package included at least US$20 million from the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) to support women-owned and -led SMEs.
Also in 2019, Social Stock Exchange (SSIX) and Impact Investment Exchange Asia (IIX) launched the Women's Livelihood Bond Series (WLB). Now on its fifth iteration, the US$150 million series is said to have created sustainable livelihoods for over 3 million women entrepreneurs across developing countries. The latest cohort, WLB4Climate, is supporting ventures in India, Indonesia, Cambodia, and the Philippines.
SAFFAL, the partners hope, will have a significant impact by narrowing the gender and climate financing gaps - and by providing women entrepreneurs with the tools to thrive.