NEW YORK, NEW YORK & WASHINGTON, D.C., 3 November 2021 – The Lightsmith Group (“Lightsmith”) announced today they have partnered with Village Capital as a part of the Adaptation SME Accelerator Project (ASAP). The partnership was announced during Finance Day at COP26 in the Resilience Hub during a panel on The Evolving Landscape of Adaptation and Resilience Enabling Solutions. 

Building on the ASAP Adaptation Solutions Taxonomy to support the identification and classification of companies offering climate resilience solutions, Village Capital and The Lightsmith Group will accelerate twenty-four SMEs and startups in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean that are scaling market-based and contextualized solutions to critical climate adaptation and resilience challenges.

Each company selected for the accelerator will have the opportunity to work closely with industry experts, investors, and ecosystem partners to develop the networks they need to scale their impact.

All startups in the program will be invited to join Abaca, Village Capital’s global online platform that helps entrepreneurs analyze and prepare their businesses for investment. The network also matches them with the right investors and resources.

ASAP is a grant-funded initiative led by The Lightsmith Group and supported by the Global Environment Facility, Conservation International, and the Inter-American Development Bank that seeks to build an ecosystem for small- to medium-sized companies in emerging markets that have technologies, products, and services that can be used to build resilience to the impacts of climate change.