This first online event was launched on March 21st was a great success with over 60 people joining online.

Inovaland and BNS network launched the Project Accelerator Series on the 21^st of March 2024; international day of forests. The inaugural event was a great success with over over 65 people joining online from twenty different countries, representing a wide mix of project developers, investors, NGO’s and other stakeholders.  

We invited people to join who had a wide range of skills and experience in investment, social development and sustainable land use. We know there are no quick fixes or silver bullets, but that by working together we can exchange knowledge and experience to resolve challenges and scale-up solutions.

There were participants from twenty different countries, and a wide mix of project developers, investors, NGO’s and other stakeholders.

Our objective with the series is to enable project developers originate and evolve forest landscape restiration and climate-smart agricultural projects, which have significant environmental and social impacts, and at the same time financially self-sustaining.  

The two projects on spotlight:

Talmond Foods (Ghana)

Tafika Community Forest (Malawi)

The discussions highlighted some common challenges and opportunities for project developers, particularly:

1. Standards and verifications systems can be cumbersome and expensive for smaller scale projects. What are the best ways to demonstrate impact, manage risks and give assurance to investors, whilst minimising cost to communities and project developers.
2. Early-stage investment – how to attract investment and support for early-stage projects, and whether that financial support should be debt or equity or a combination.
3. A key strength of community led projects is the value in community development, social inclusion and capacity building. How can we better capture that value and use it to support investment decisions?  
4. If a project works well in a community or region, it is important to understand how and why it works well. If we want to scale-up we need to understand whether we should be increasing the size of that project in the correct location or whether we should focus on replicating the project in other location.

Takeaways  

• Forest landscape restoration and regenerative agriculture are long term initiatives, and the social-economic drivers of unsustainable land-use are also long term. We need policies and projects that integrate forest restoration with sustainable timber plantations, which balance food production with nature, and that are attractive to investors whilst creating shared value in local communities. 

• Every project will have a unique set of circumstance and values, those circumstances will change and evolve as the project develops and matures. Similarly external factors especially those driven by a changing climate are also shifting rapidly.  

• With this Accelerator Series, by bringing people together and sharing experiences, we hope to have built dialogue and understanding about these challenges, and given confidence to everyone involved.

We are greateful to Elie, Mick and Malumbo for presenting and we will continue to work with them for the rest of the year to follow up on discussions and make connections. We also want to say a huge thank you to all the other participants who shared their knowledge and experience so generously. 

If you’d like your project to feature in a future Accelerator event, then please get in touch info@inovaland.earth. Similarly, if you are an investor or founder Interested in working with innovative and resilient projects then we would love to hear from you.  

Feedback from participants 

“Thank you to the iNovaland team, this event gave us the chance to tell our story and ask a group of experts for their help. We’ve made some amazing connections as a result of participating in the Accelerator event and we are hopeful these will both strengthen our existing project and help us develop a second phase”. Malumbo Munthali  (Tafika Project, Malawai).

“It’s incredibly inspiring to meet and hear first-hand from the project proponents who are passionately working on their initiatives that aim to benefit nature and people. We hope that this series of calls helps to highlight and accelerate these amazing initiatives and people. And we look forward to further connecting and growing the community of professionals working with bankable nature solutions”. Natalya Skiba (WWF BNS (Bankable Nature Solutions) Network coordinator, Netherlands).

“We are striving to make an environmental, social and economic impact by creating new value chains around climate-resilient neglected crops and thus creating countless jobs from cultivation to aggregation to production with maximum value-add in Ghana”. Elie Fink, founder and CEO Talmond Foods.

The next online event is comming!

The second event will be focused on projects in Brazil. follow iNovaland and BNS on LinkedIn for updates and more details.