Evaluation and Learning Partnership on financing forest-related enterprises - Learning from the Forest Investment Program and other initiatives

The Forest Investment Program (FIP), launched in 2009, is one of four programmes financed by the Climate Investment Funds (CIF). It was set up to provide and leverage additional funding to address drivers of deforestation and forest degradation. The private sector has an important role to play in this regard. The FIP design therefore focuses on how replicable business models can achieve transformational change leading to poverty reduction, sustainable forest management, and low carbon development.

Feedback to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) deliberations on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) is part of the design. Important lessons are emerging from the last decade of FIP efforts to finance sustainable forest-related enterprises and overcome a range of challenges, including perceptions of high risk.

This review, seeking to capture those lessons, was commissioned by the Evaluation and Learning Initiative of the CIF. IIED and Land and Timber Services (LTS) facilitated an Evaluation and Learning Partnership on Financing Forest-Related Enterprises (ELPFFRE) to carry out this review, and to develop and disseminate its findings. The focus was primarily on forward-looking evidence-based learning for the Forest Investment Program (FIP). While it builds on early results from the FIP's own investments in these areas, it also draws on a rich body of experience gained by social and impact investors outside of the FIP.