In collaboration with IUCN and FAO and in the context of the Restoration Initiative, a GEF-funded project, UNEP is welcoming its first cohort of restoration ecopreneurs to participate in an innovative business incubator program aimed at strengthening the economic potential of their ideas to unlock more finance, more quickly.
What is it?
The Restoration Factory is an e-learning program that assists restoration entrepreneurs in developing enticing and attractive business models of restoration. To achieves this important objective, it harnesses the expertise of a community of private sector mentors who are committed to guide their mentees through each step of their business discovery journey. This tailored support is then catalysed through a rigorous 6-month training program, co-designed with the social entreprise Bridge for Billions, that borrows from the best business development curriculums, including the MIT’s disciplined entrepreneur method. It is practical, solution-oriented and evidence-based, promoting a scientific method of verifiable experimentation, through assumptions, tests and validations.
By the end, each participant will have prepared a business plan that best represents its economic and financial potential, paving the way for a fruitful engagement with investors and donors.
Why is it important?
Forests provide livelihood for more than 1 billion people around the world and play a critical role in stabilizing the world’s climate. Despite these incredible services to people, forests are still under significant threat with 30% of global forest cover cleared, another 20% degraded and only 15% of forest cover currently intact. Rising global demand for food and increasingly scarce available land only exacerbate these trends and is bringing a renewed sense of urgency. This is a crisis that demands urgent action at a scale only possible if large-scale investments are mobilised through viable and attractive business proposals that can put to rest the idea that restoration projects are necessarily risky and costly.
How does it work?
Key to tackling the restoration challenge requires to build attractive, bankable forest and landscape models. Capacity needs to be built and mentoring provided to restoration leaders to give the competitive edge needed to help them unlock more finance, quicker, for greater impact.
To that end, The Restoration Factory aims to short-circuit traditional learning methods by giving project developers online access to bespoke advice from expert mentors, for immediate application to their business ideas.
The Restoration Factory has been designed from the ground up to help answer the main questions and challenges of the new generation of eco-entrepreneurs striving to make restoration the future of business: value proposition, competition and shareholder maps, pricing and business viability, marketing and financial plans, impact strategy and growth plan.
In total, the 6-month program comprises eight different business tools, all grounded in practical exercises intended to validate assumptions with data. They are articulated around the MIT’s highly successful disciplined entrepreneur model framework are supplemented by an extensive list of complementary materials from partner organisations, including FAO, IUCN, P4F and WWF’s Landscape Finance Lab.
Throughout this journey to bankability, each participant will be able to count on his or her mentor to guide him with valuable advices and insights. Learning can then become more practical, more efficient and more impactful.
Interested in getting involved or learning more about the Factory?
Contact us: Jonathan.gheyssens[at]un.org
