Apply now: Catalytic grants and innovation OR investment readiness support for ventures building climate resilience in food systems in Southeast Asia
We're offering catalytic grants and hands-on support to ventures using technology to strengthen the financial resilience of farmers, fishers and food businesses across Southeast Asia. We’re helping them prove what works and get ready to scale.
Deadline for applications: 17th August, 11.59pm (GMT+1)
Link to the full open call details here.
The Challenge
Fishers and farmers in Southeast Asia's food systems, on land and coast, are among the most climate-exposed people on earth. A single typhoon, flood or drought can wipe out a season's income overnight, and many have neither the buffer to absorb the loss nor the means to take up adaptive, resilience-building practices. Since 2000, disasters have affected 3.7 billion people in Asia, against 1.1 billion across the rest of the world combined (CIIP, 2026). Globally, losses across crops, livestock, fisheries and aquaculture reached $3.26 trillion between 1991 and 2023, 91% of it climate-related, on land and at sea (FAO, 2025).
The solutions being built to close this adaptation finance gap - tech-enabled products, services and business models - struggle to grow. They tend to be small, scattered and early-stage: stranded between grant funding and the investment that would scale them. Enabling, testing and supporting this pipeline is how we help the strongest solutions reach the investors who could fund them to scale.
The opportunity
We're offering catalytic grants of £15,000 – £20,000 to help ventures and organisations with solutions to address these challenges move toward scale and investment readiness - enough to test and prove the step that matters most.
Alongside the capital, you'll get:
Technical assistance - specialist technical and sector expertise to help you design and deliver.
Innovation coaching - hands-on support to sharpen both your plan and how you pitch it to future funders and partners.
Connections - introductions to investors, government and ecosystem actors who could back your growth.
A cohort of peers - other ventures on the same journey, to share experience and learning as you go.
What we’re looking for
We're looking for tech-enabled ventures and solutions that help Southeast Asia's food systems (and the people who depend on them) withstand a changing climate. Every application should speak to four themes:
Tech-enabled. Technology is central to how the solution works or how it reaches scale - and it's the right tool for the job: relevant, usable and fitted to the context and users it serves, not technology in search of a problem.
Climate adaptation. It helps food-system actors prepare for, absorb or adapt to climate risk - whether sudden shocks (typhoons, floods, drought, heat) or slower change (shifting seasons, salinity, rising temperatures).
Food systems.* It sits somewhere in the food system - anywhere along the chain from production, post-harvest and processing through to distribution and markets - or as a cross-cutting enabler that strengthens it.
Financial resilience. Ultimately it strengthens the financial resilience of those in the food system most exposed to climate risk - smallholder farmers, fishers and actors across the food-system. Financial resilience is what lets them invest in adaptation and act on climate risk, rather than fall back on reactive coping.
* Climate change is making some livelihoods unviable. Alongside solutions that build resilience within the food system, we're also interested in those that help people transition from a livelihood under threat into a more resilient one - a fisher moving into farming, for example.
For the full scope of work, evaluation criteria and application instructions - please access the full open call details here