Resilience Innovation through Scaling Entrepreneurship

Summary

In 2025, the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) committed to launching the Resilience Innovation through Scaling Entrepreneurship (RISE) Urban Challenge to identify and scale innovative urban resilience solutions in informal settings across Official Development Assistance-eligible countries, thereby closing the urban climate investment gap. Through a global open call, GRP will support selected projects with tailored mentoring, a leadership academy, prize funding of up to $50,000, and connection to investors. The first round, RISE 1, will be implemented between late 2025 and the end of 2026, with future rounds planned pending the availability of additional funding. GRP encourages youth-led and women-led organizations to submit proposals and expects to directly support 20,000 individuals, particularly women and urban poor communities. By strengthening locally led, investable solutions to address climate risk, resilience retrofit, water security, and urban migration and displacement, this commitment aims to increase resilience in some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable urban areas.

Approach

The Global Resilience Partnership (GRP) is launching the Resilience Innovation through Scaling Entrepreneurship (RISE) Urban Challenge to convert innovative urban ideas that meet resilience needs in informal contexts and scale them to sustainable ideas. The RISE Urban Challenge provides customised support to maximise each initiative’s potential for impact, aligns potential funders to these initiatives, and drives attention to the urgent need for urban systems transformation.

RISE is looking for innovative solutions addressing urban resilience challenges in informal contexts – a few examples include but are not limited to climate risk, resilience retrofit, water security, urban migration, and displacement. RISE is open to urban entrepreneurs, innovators, organisations or consortia of organisations across the private sector (start-ups, SMEs) , and civil society and grassroots organisations based in low- and middle-income countries. Proposals from youth-led and women-led organisations are encouraged.

Selected projects (both finalists and winners) will receive a tailored leadership and mentoring programme, communications support, and be connected to investors. Subject matter experts will facilitate a leadership academy for the selected entrants. They will also be connected to potential investors and partners from GRP networks. GRP brings expertise in resilience research, urban informal contexts, innovation identification and scaling, and regional knowledge across the Global South

Action Plan

The first round of the RISE Challenge (RISE 1) was launched in 2025 with an open call for proposals and received a total of 577 submissions from a wide diversity of ODA (Official Development Assistance) -eligible countries. The geographical scope of RISE is global (all urban areas in ODA-eligible countries) .

Review and shortlisting will be carried out in 2025, and 10-15 shortlisted finalist projects will be announced in June 2025. Shortlisted projects/ businesses will receive tailored mentorship support and participate in a Leadership Academy in Q3 of 2025. 10-15 Winners will be selected after the initial mentorship support and leadership academy. Winners can be awarded prizes up to $50,000 in Q4 of 2025, which will support their implementation over 12 months up to December 2026.

These RISE 1 winners will benefit from a programme of tailored mentoring, monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) , communications and leadership support to make their project more scalable and impactful, and can pitch their projects at a (virtual) investor forum at the end of 2026.

RISE 2 will be launched in Q4 of 2025 and RISE 3 in Q4 of 2026, pending funding and will follow a similar action plan as RISE 1.

Background

Currently, only 1.2% of urban climate investments flow to climate change adaptation and resilience solutions (Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance, 2024) . Increasing investment flows requires diversifying and strengthening the solution pipeline across different models – for-profit, not-for-profit, private-sector-led, and private–public partnerships, as well as nurturing an enabling environment – policy, finance, measurement, and evidence-building – for these solutions to scale.

Vulnerability to climate risks is extremely skewed across urban populations, with informal workers, residents in informal settlements, migrants and displaced people, as well as young and elderly people, facing the triple challenge of higher exposure to climate change hazards, higher susceptibility to damages caused by climate change and a lesser financial ability to cope and recover from shocks. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for innovative solutions that build resilience to climate risks.

Scaling solutions in informal contexts is especially difficult due to a range of systemic challenges. These include limited access to long-term and flexible financing, unclear land tenure, and weak municipal support, which hinder infrastructure investment and solution uptake. Data scarcity, low human capacity, and a lack of supportive regulatory frameworks further complicate scaling efforts, along with difficulty in integrating solutions into public systems. In contrast to formal environments, informal contexts lack the enabling ecosystems—such as reliable partnerships, policy support, and market mechanisms—needed to sustain and scale resilience solutions. Moreover, most innovations remain in early testing stages due to short funding cycles and misalignment between funder priorities and community needs.

Progress Update

Partnership Opportunities

Stakeholders are invited to join GRP in this transformative initiative as ecosystem or funding partners. The RISE challenge seeks: (i) support for the execution of RISE and other GRP Challenges, (ii) investment support for the winner(s) of the Challenges, and (iii) in-kind support to accelerate scale-up (e.g. Promotional media support, providing experts and mentors, participation in Investor Forum) . Financial support can be provided by funding: (i) GRP’s wider innovation work, (ii) co-creating a bespoke Challenge (like RISE) , (iii) supporting a RISE window (climate risk action, resilience retrofit, water security, urban migration and displacement) , (iv) prizes of Challenge Winners, and (v) events and/or knowledge products. Reasons to partner with RISE include early access to resilience innovations, access to a network of resilience and adaptation experts, and contributing to accelerating resilience in the Global South.,The RISE Challenge winners will receive a programme of tailored mentoring, communications and MEL support and will be connected to potential partners and/or investors. In addition to this there will be prizes up to US$50,000 (likely ranging between US$ 10,000-30,000 for this first year of implementation) for winning projects. The offer: (i) challenge competitions to surface and scale innovative locally-led ideas that promote resilience, (ii) tailored funding, mentoring, leadership, communications, and learning support, (iii) capacity exchange and leadership development to ensure cross-pollination, (iv) an alumni network of innovators and entrepreneurs supported for peer-learning, (v) connecting winners to investors to enable scaling and sustained results, (vi) over a decade of experience surfacing and scaling innovations in the Global South, and (vii) a strengthened ecosystem that adds to the pipeline of investable resilience solutions.