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Challenge Fund

Palladium commits 1.5% of its profit before tax to support entrepreneurs, start-ups, and innovative organizations, advancing the communities, economies, and societies where they operate. Kyeema has partnered with Palladium to manage its positive impact initiatives worldwide, including the Challenge Fund.

About the Challenge Fund

The future demands new thinking, approaches, and solutions. The Palladium Challenge Fund taps into ideas from its network in over 90 countries and its partnerships with over 1,600 organizations globally to source innovative responses to global challenges.

Operating on an annual theme, the Challenge Fund supports organizations and initiatives that:

  • Pilot new technologies and innovative approaches
  • De-risk start-up ventures
  • Deliver outcomes from innovative financial mechanisms
  • Support the convening of innovation challenges

Applications to the Palladium Challenge Fund are eligible for funding if they are from a for-profit, non-profit, or grassroots entity, including small or start-up organizations. Applications are typically for single-year activities, although multi-year applications are considered on a case-by-case basis, and for funding of no more than AU$100,000.

Submissions for the Challenge Fund are currently closed.

Past Projects

2022 Measuring the Value of Nature

Space4Good | Remote Sensing | Sustainability | Netherlands

Space4Good is developing their ‘Carbometrica’ Measurement, Reporting & Verification (MRV) tool for remote-sensing biomass and carbon assessment of agroforestry and afforestation projects. Palladium funding will help support the development of a new AI and machine learning algorithm for the South East Asian eco-region.

Status: In progress

Treeconomy - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding

Project will focus on training and placing female Palestinian refugees in the tech industry, showcasing a scalable social enterprise model that can reduce barriers to women’s representation in tech. It has strong replication potential in the digital industry, which has two million open development roles.

Status: In progress

FarmTree B.V. | LinkedIn

FarmTree B.V will pilot and test their FarmTree Tool in Ethiopia’s coffee system, helping to integrate carbon and biodiversity credits and certification, and improve agroforestry planning and management for up to 12,000 coffee farming households.

Read more on this project here.

Status: Complete

2022 Jobs for Refugees

Kyeema Foundation | LinkedIn

Lira Magoya in Uganda will provide training, employment, and sales opportunities in cassava farming and processing for refugees from South Sudan. Palladium funding will help provide training in cassava production and processing, distribute seeds (often drought resilient) to outgrowers, and expand cassava processing capacity. Cassava outgrowers will also improve nutritional outcomes as farm families consume cassava they grow, and increase farm incomes by selling a portion of production.

Read more on this project here.

Status: In progress

Incluyeme.com – Helping people with disabilities find a job | Incluyeme.com

Will partner with the National Technological University of Argentina, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and 600 employers to train and place Latin American refugees in well-paying jobs. The project will help build local capacity and relationships across the university, private sector, and refugee-serving groups to train and place marginalised populations in growing digital sectors.

Status: In progress

CONCAT Tech

Project will focus on training and placing female Palestinian refugees in the tech industry, showcasing a scalable social enterprise model that can reduce barriers to women’s representation in tech. It has strong replication potential in the digital industry, which has two million open development roles.

Status: Complete

2021 Valuing Nature

Oyster Heaven Logo

Oyster Heaven aims to unlock the proven conservation benefits and promising commercial opportunities of oyster reef regeneration, by providing missing technologies and protocols that would allow the regeneration and conservation of this natural capital to become scalable and monetisable. One of the key benefits of oyster reefs lies in their ability to sequester (among others) carbon, nitrogen and phosphates from water at far lower opportunity cost than land based ecological interventions. Growing recognition of the damage caused by these substances has created incentive for a trading scheme in phosphates and nitrogen (similar to existing carbon credit trading schemes). This creates an opportunity to develop a profitable business model around regenerating lost oyster reefs. The core objective is to develop and test a key innovative technology (biofilm) as a growth medium for oyster beds. Longer term this would inform a set of products, tools and protocols which would allow oyster reef regeneration to be scalable, affordable and sustainable.

Status: Complete

Read more on this project here.

Rebalance-Earth-Logo

This project aims to build a marketplace for buyers to purchase ecosystem services credits produced by keystone species, in this case forest elephants. Through the sale of ecosystem services credits, the pilot will demonstrate the ability to transfer funds from buyers to local communities and wildlife justice initiatives in a transparent, traceable and trusted manner, establishing a higher monetary value for living keystone species that far supersedes its value when dead. Funds from off-setters will go towards supporting wildlife justice initiatives and communities responsible for the protection of keystone species.

Read more on this project here.

Status: Complete

nakau programme logo

The project aims to assist indigenous landholders in Erromango, Vanuatu to generate financial incentives to protect their ecosystems, which can then deliver a pathway for sustainable development and livelihoods, as well as co-benefits associated with ecosystem services such as carbon emission reduction and local nature-based resilience. The project aims to establish and trial an innovative approach with the Erromango Forest Carbon project by aiming to design, test and strengthen an innovative and sustainable business model to manage an island-scale forest carbon project.

The project aims to scale this innovative nature-based solution through improving land use planning approaches on an island scale and finance the development of community level land management activities to support forest restoration efforts and diversify livelihoods of community members. This business model and unique methodology will be established with the support of Nakau and their implementing partners Live and Learn Vanuatu to support local communities to manage their own forest carbon project and benefit sharing.

Status: Discontinued

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