Kinetic

Blended finance for pioneering impact 

The impact and risk appetite of our catalytic capital toolkit is part of our distinctive offer within the development finance community. We strive to develop new tools to achieve impact. 

Our recently introduced ‘Kinetic Portfolio’ has been designed to enable us to invest and manage catalytic investment strategies. It complements our existing Growth and Catalyst Portfolios and BII Plus technical assistance capabilities, ensuring we’re providing a comprehensive and flexible capital toolkit to help address our partners’ investment and development needs. 

This portfolio has a higher risk tolerance than our existing Growth and Catalyst investment strategies and it can be blended with other forms of capital. Through the portfolio, we’re able to use catalytic capital in different ways to support our partners – ranging from funding to support them to close the ‘viability gap’ on projects, to flexible debt products. 

We assess all Kinetic investments against the Enhanced Blended Concessional Finance Principles for Private Sector Projects developed by the DFI Working Group on Blended Concessional Finance for Private Sector Projects. 

We currently have three facilities in the Kinetic portfolio, each with a distinct impact objective: 

1. Climate Innovation Facility (£240m) 

Introduced in 2021, the Climate Innovation Facility has a highly catalytic, climate-focused investment mandate. It enables BII to test, seed and scale cutting-edge technologies or unproven business models and strategies that have the potential for transformational impact on the lives of people and communities in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. We aim to use the risk-tolerance and catalytic potential of this capital to deliver flexible, creative solutions that address crucial gaps in our markets through tools such as credit/return enhancement, viability gap funding, project development loans and flexible debt. Focus themes include Productive Use of Renewable Energy (PURE), Agriculture and Forestry and Green Infrastructure. More information on CIF investments announced at COP28 (BasiGo, SunCulture) are available here. 

2. Mobilisation Facility (£100m) 

In 2024, the Prime Minister announced the introduction of this facility, focused on unlocking private capital for climate and sustainability-focused investments in emerging economies. You can read more here. In January 2025 BII launched a request for proposals in partnership with Mercer calling on the private investment community to help design investment products that seek to address the gap between risk appetite and return thresholds of institutional investors.  

3. Africa Resilience Investment Facility (£50m) 

This facility, announced in February 2025, will deliver much-needed finance to spur economic growth in some of the towards the world’s poorest countries. It aims to unlock more finance for growing high potential businesses in those African countries which currently have the furthest to travel to attract commercial investment.  The ARIF mandate will have the ability to invest across all African Low-Income Countries (LICs). 

The African Resilience Investment Facility (ARIF) will stimulate investment in critical infrastructure and real economy sectors by deploying targeted blended finance. It complements BII’s pioneering work in leading collaboration with other DFIs to better identify and coordinate investment opportunities in frontier markets through the African Resilience Investment Accelerator (ARIA).