Private investments present a critical funding opportunity to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, due to the growing recognition that socially and environmentally responsible solutions can generate impacts and financial returns across the risk spectrum. Innovative new mobility solutions—especially when driven by impact-oriented investments and enabled by inclusive policies—can be part of the solution for sustainable and equitable transport.

The research paper features key insights on impact-driven investments in new mobility enterprises in Kampala, Uganda, and Hyderabad, India. The paper highlights the current challenges to impact investing in mobility enterprises, including difficulties in accounting for impact, dilution of impact from other sectors, regulatory regimes and political risks that could hinder the running of mobility businesses, and entrenched stakeholders holding back investments. It concludes with opportunities to confront these challenges and pathways to safe, clean and inclusive transportation for vulnerable urban residents in the global south.

Key Findings:

  • As is illustrated by the two case studies in Kampala, Uganda, and Hyderabad, India, impact investing in mobility enterprises is not common due to difficulty in accounting for impact, dilution of impact amidst cross-cutting sectors, and systemic challenges such as entrenched stakeholders holding back investments and regulatory regimes and political risks that could hinder the running of mobility businesses.
  • Establishing transport impact metrics and a clear narrative of outcomes to impacts is difficult because the mobility sector serves as a critical but often unacknowledged, sometimes indirect, linkage for areas such as health, education, gender equity, urban development, and climate change.
  • For impact investing in mobility enterprises to work, investors, governments, and other stakeholders must understand the enterprises’ market and institutional barriers and net impacts—both positive and negative—and be prepared to partner and support them in overcoming the barriers.

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