The Catalytic Capital Consortium (C3) is an investment, learning, and market development initiative created and led by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and the Omidyar Network. Together, these partners jointly fund the C3 Grantmaking program, which is housed at and administered the New Venture Fund (NVF). C3 aims to increase the flow and impact of catalytic capital to make social and environmental progress that would not otherwise be possible.

The C3 Grantmaking program will award up to $10 million over three years for research, networking, peer learning and other field-building activities, with a specific focus on foundations, development finance institutions, family offices and ultra high net worth individuals. In October, 2021 C3 announced awards to support 14 research projects that will analyze the uses of catalytic capital around the world and help build the evidence base to fuel additional risk-tolerant, flexible and patient investments that address critical global challenges.

The Bertha Centre is part of a collaboration comprising the Centre, the Initiative for Blended Finance at University of Zurich, and Roots of Impact that was awarded a research grant under C3’s Strengthening the Evidence Base stream. Together, the organisations are researching the perspectives of entrepreneurs in the Global South as the end users of catalytic capital, focusing on creating positive impact in developing and emerging markets.

The research consortium seeks to learn more from the perspective of entrepreneurs as the “consumers” of catalytic capital. The project will aim to better identify and understand the value that entrepreneurs in the Global South find in catalytic structures and how these structures might be improved to better meet their needs for creating positive impact at scale. The project combines a literature review, structured interviews with innovative finance experts, and deeper discussion with 25 impact entrepreneurs across sectors and regions to generate insights.

Value and Outcomes: Focusing on the entrepreneurs’ experience and needs with respect to catalytic capital is a distinctive contribution to evidence-based learning for the field, as catalytic capital research often tends to focus on the experiences, motivations and lessons learned at the investor side of the equation. This research will surface information that will be published in various position papers, journal articles and blogs, as well as presented at conferences for practitioners and investors in the late part of 2022 and early part of 2023.