ISEAL Innovations Fund

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To remain effective in a fast-evolving landscape of emerging legislation and stronger calls for sustainability action, sustainability systems need to push boundaries. In response to this urgent need for innovation, the ISEAL Innovations Fund supports sustainability systems to drive collective action on key sustainability challenges.

The Innovations Fund was co-founded with the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO in 2016. It is ISEAL’s grant-making facility to support sustainability systems unlock new innovative partnerships, approaches and solutions that can operate at scale. 

The Fund drives innovation by providing grantees with technical support, guidance, and promoting cross-sector learning within and beyond the ISEAL community. With this support, sustainability systems can collaborate on critical sustainability challenges, deliver value to their stakeholders, and meet the evolving needs of governments, companies and smallholders along the value chain.   

Key focal areas

The Fund has five cross-cutting focus areas that specifically address how sustainability systems can improve their effectiveness in driving sector transformation and address the needs of their stakeholders. These focus areas help us to streamline the learning and gather the latest evidence on the challenges and opportunities among sustainability systems and their partners.

focal areas

The Fund's Guiding Principles are:

  • Innovation: Each project tests new ideas, tools or approaches, and generates learning.
  • Relevance: Each project contributes to the Innovations Programme's overall objectives.
  • Replicability and applicability: There is high potential for replicability of project outputs and outcomes across different sustainability systems, sectors and regions.
  • Engaging beneficiaries: Where applicable, there is strong buy-in and engagement from target beneficiaries in both the design and implementation phases.
  • Monitoring and learning: Each project commits to capturing and sharing lessons and outcomes, including measuring and reporting on key indicators.
  • Collaboration: Each project takes a partnership approach, engaging with other sustainability systems, or integrating with other tools or frameworks.
  • Value for investment: The expected impact of each project, including its learning value, is high relative to its investment.

 

The Innovations Fund is made possible thanks to the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs SECO and UK International Development from the UK government:

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