Magnitude Global Finance (MGF) is a women-owned boutique sustainable finance and investment advisory firm. Their focus is on helping their clients design investments, access capital, and finance the transition to a low-carbon, nature positive economy. MGF works across donors, development finance institutions (DFIs), investors, fund managers, governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and enterprises to structure and mobilize capital for climate, nature, and development outcomes.
We spoke with Amanda Lonsdale, CEO at MGF about their approach to blended finance, impact measurement, how they apply a gender lens, challenges they have faced in the space, and more.
What are your key priorities and what are you focusing on right now?
At our core we’re translators, we sit between the people with capital and the people building solutions on the ground, and we help them better understand each other. Today, much of our work focuses on climate adaptation and resilience, nature-based solutions, energy, sustainable agriculture, and biodiversity. Practically, that means helping clients build pipelines that are investable, structuring blended finance vehicles, and connecting capital to the opportunities that can deliver both a return and real impact.
Sometimes we’re helping create the conditions for investment, for example, conducting market sounding, sourcing investable pipeline, and identifying market gaps and opportunities. Other times we’re in the weeds on a specific transaction, helping structure and execute it. The common thread is finding ways to move capital into impactful solutions.
Tell us about your approach to blended finance and how it has evolved.
We always start with a simple set of questions: what problem are we trying to solve, why hasn’t it already been solved (i.e., what are the real and perceived risks), and what is the simplest solution? We don’t start with a particular capital structure or instrument—we seek to understand the barriers to investment and the best way to overcome them, reserving the financial structuring for risks that can’t be mitigated otherwise. Once we have a clear picture of the risks and opportunities, everything else flows from that.
Over time, we have become much more focused on ensuring concessional capital is used strategically and efficiently. We look first to see if we can de-risk the project or instrument in some other way—through better pipeline work, market validation, better data, or smarter transaction design. Deploying catalytic capital is reserved for the residual risk. With concessional and donor capital getting scarcer, every dollar needs to be doing real work.
We’ve also gotten better at seeing where development objectives and capital market realities diverge. We look to transform projects and funds in new markets, sectors, or geographies into familiar structures that are understood by more mainstream investors. In addition to structuring, we layer in impact elements to ensure alignment with financial objectives. Complexity or innovation for its own sake isn’t a virtue. Some of the best structures are tried-and-true approaches applied in new contexts. In fact, we tell our clients to limit their “innovation” to one element of their fund or instrument. If they’re going into a new market, they should use a conventional structure and invest in familiar things – funds that are overly complex structurally, focused in complicated markets, and investing in esoteric sectors have an uphill battle in terms of getting investors comfortable with multiple layers of risk. Keeping things simple is a much better recipe for success.
Can you share some examples of blended finance transactions or projects you have supported and how?
The Investment Mobilisation Collaboration Alliance (IMCA) is probably the best example. It's a coalition of donor and development partners trying to mobilize private capital to support a range of climate priorities including through the most recent Adaptation Finance Window for Africa. MGF is the engine behind it — we did the market sounding, designed the procurement in cooperation with the participating Nordic donors and DFIs, ran the competitive selection, and managed and sat on the evaluation committee. It was structured mainly as a first-loss grant facility, so we are also working to do some matchmaking to fill in the other blended finance pieces the selected funds need.
Another example from IMCA is the responsAbility Asia Climate Fund, a $500 million fund focused on energy transition in emerging markets. We structured and executed a first-loss junior tranche through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)'s Climate Finance for Development Accelerator, which helped bring in institutional investors who had no prior exposure to emerging market energy transition deals. That kind of de-risking, translating between development and commercial finance, is at the heart of what we do. We're also the structuring advisor for several instruments through the Climate Policy Initiative’s Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance, helping selected instruments optimize their capital stacks and keep both complexity and concessional capital to a minimum.
We’re also working more in the nature finance space. With the Mangrove Breakthrough we are seeking pilot transactions that mobilize finance for mangrove-positive projects. With a family office, we're building a pipeline of landscape-level blended finance instruments across Asia that combine nature-based and market-based approaches. Across Africa we continue to support nature-based carbon projects and platforms, making sure the financial models actually protect the rights of the communities and investors involved.
What are some lessons you have learned so far about measuring the impact and evaluating the success of blended finance transactions?
The biggest lesson is that impact measurement needs to be rigorous, but also realistic and suited to what is being measured.
The impact investing world rightly cares a lot about measurement and accountability, but we've seen firsthand how messy and burdensome that can get — especially for smaller or first-time fund managers who don't have a big back office. Every investor wants their own bespoke metrics, and that adds up fast in terms of time and cost for funds and their portfolio companies and projects. We’re currently working with the Investors Resilience Challenge, an initiative championed by 16 DFIs and private investor signatories to create a common set of criteria around adaptation and resilience to develop a common understanding of what qualifies as an adaptation or resilience investment, along with a common approach to measuring it.
In terms of evaluating the success of transactions, we've learned you have to hold two things in your head at once: the numbers and the actual impact. It's tempting to chase big capital mobilization figures, but if the capital isn't really landing where it needs to, the fund isn't well positioned to deploy it, or the catalytic capital isn’t really needed, that erodes the credibility of the whole exercise. So we're always asking: where is this catalytic capital actually going, is it needed, and who's really benefiting?
It can also be difficult to manage the success of a blended finance investment due to the timing mismatch between your typical catalytic capital facility and the life of a fund or project. Donors and grant facilities tend to work in one-to-five-year cycles, but the funds they help launch often run ten years or more, especially in nature-based work — we often joke that you can't rush trees. By the time a fund is generating real, measurable outcomes on the ground, the facility that got it off the ground has usually already wound down. So measuring success means looking both at the near-term and at where things are headed over the long run.
What are the recurring themes or challenges clients come to MGF for support with?
A lot of clients come to us because they have a genuinely compelling impact story that they want to turn into something investable. We see this frequently in adaptation, biodiversity, landscape restoration, and regenerative agriculture — areas where the social and environmental case may be obvious, but the commercial pathway isn't. We work with many clients who have great ideas, great networks, and real track records on the ground, but need support finding the financing piece to make their concept a reality. With the aid landscape changing so much, that's become even more urgent.
Clients often use us as a thought partner — someone who will tell them honestly whether what they're proposing will work. We're not afraid to push back, point out blind spots, and help refine the idea before too much time or money is committed.
The specifics vary by sector — in adaptation finance it's often about reconciling impact ambitions with commercial viability; in nature finance it's usually the gap between strong projects with nowhere to go for capital and investors who have capital but no visibility into how to deploy it. Underneath most of it is the same issue: it's rarely a lack of capital, rather a lack of connection between the capital and the opportunity.
How does MGF apply a gender lens in its blended finance work? At what stage are gender considerations typically discussed?
For us, gender has to be there from day one — in how we staff a project, how we write proposals, and how we advise clients — not bolted on later.
With IMCA, for example, gender runs through the whole process. Asset managers applying to the facility have to explain how gender shows up in their investment thesis, not just whether there's a woman on the board. We also look at it at the transaction level — how individual deals are structured and what their gender impact actually looks like. We lean on standards like the 2X Criteria where it's useful, and we're also interested in the flip side of that question: why investees themselves want to be 2X qualified in the first place and what the business case looks like from where they sit.
Sometimes this gets very concrete. On a national climate finance policy project for Mozambique, we recommended explicitly that the steering committee be gender balanced. On a Green Climate Fund (GCF) concept for Somalia, we found specific points in the design where we could push for more gender equity, even when that meant navigating real cultural sensitivities. We also helped them design a blended finance solution to get loan products to hundreds of thousands of women entrepreneurs across fragile states.
Our work spans many sectors and geographies, but what stays consistent is the belief that gender belongs in the strategy and governance of a deal, not as a box to check at the end.
Are there any interesting or unexpected challenges MGF has faced in the blended finance space so far?
One challenge that comes up frequently is the gap between ambition and how investors actually make decisions. Stakeholders are often genuinely eager to solve a real problem but don't fully understand how capital allocators think, while investors may be interested in a theme like adaptation or nature but have no visibility into what's actually happening on the ground.
A more subtle version of that is the tension between facilities that are designed top-down versus ones that are built in response to the market. When a donor or DFI sets a facility up around a fixed geography, sector, or gender requirement without real market consultation you end up with one of two outcomes: the facility doesn't attract the funds it was meant to serve, or worse, funds reverse-engineer themselves just to qualify. We've seen this pattern repeatedly, and it's the reason real market sounding isn't optional — it's the difference between something that works and something that doesn't.
We've also seen a lot of overengineering. Some structures get more complicated without actually addressing the underlying barrier to investment — it's almost like people have heard every blended finance term and want to use all of them: a first loss, a guarantee, concessional equity, and concessional debt, without a clear reason for each.
The funding landscape itself keeps shifting under our feet. As traditional sources of concessional capital get squeezed, we're seeing every kind of organization — private sector, philanthropies, DFIs, NGOs — move toward blended finance, which makes for some interesting new approaches but also a lot of noise.
One thing that has genuinely surprised us is how big a knowledge gap still exists on the investor side. Some of the largest institutions with real capital to deploy have decision-makers who have simply never come across tools like nature bonds or debt-for-nature swaps. These aren't exotic — they're well-documented, replicable mechanisms. But if the people sitting on the capital have never heard of them, the gap between available tools and deployed capital stays wide.
What have the different types of stakeholders that you've worked with looked for in blended finance deals? What sectors have been of the most interest?
Part of what makes our work interesting is how broad our stakeholder universe really is — fund managers, DFIs, bilateral and multilateral donors, family offices, foundations, commercial banks, project developers, NGOs, civil society groups, local governments. Each one comes to blended finance with a different set of constraints.
DFIs and donors generally want to know their concessional capital is doing real work, not just substituting for commercial capital that would have shown up anyway. Fund managers and commercial investors care about risk-adjusted returns and whether the fund is actually viable to run day to day. Family offices and foundations sit in an interesting middle ground — they're private capital, but more flexible on returns and more willing to go where purely commercial money won't. We're seeing more interest from that group, and we think it's underused for the kinds of markets we work in.
On sectors, renewable energy transition still draws the most interest. Agriculture and landscape finance remain more difficult. They are harder to make bankable and less familiar to most investors, but that difficulty is exactly where the blended finance opportunity lies. Nature-based solutions such as mangroves, forests, seaweed, and biodiversity more broadly are an area of growing interest, even though there's still a lot of work to translate conservation goals into something private capital can actually invest in at scale.
How do you see MGF's blended finance activities evolving in the future?
We think the next chapter of blended finance comes down to building stronger connections between the people who need capital and the people deploying it. For us, that means evolving along two tracks.
The first is doubling down on our role as translators and honest brokers as the people who can sit across the table from a DFI, a first-time fund manager, an NGO, and a commercial bank and help all of them understand each other well enough to get to a transaction. If anything, the demand for that role is growing as things get more complex. We're especially interested in helping unlock new sources of catalytic capital (e.g., local institutional investors, family offices, foundations, pension funds) who are looking for a practical way into climate and nature finance.
The second track is getting closer to the financial vehicles themselves. We've built up a lot of expertise in how funds are structured and what works, and the natural next step is to be more than advisors — to be co-architects, maybe even co-owners. Whether that's an early-stage catalytic fund for nature-based carbon, a blended finance platform for a specific landscape, or a vehicle built around a particular adaptation gap, we'd like to be more directly involved in the deals themselves.
GCF will stay central to all of this. Since USAID has shuttered and bilateral funding has pulled back, GCF has become one of the last major sources of dedicated climate finance, and there's real appetite among NGOs, DFIs, and governments to develop GCF-backed projects both through navigating accreditation and writing strong proposals. We've been supporting clients across that spectrum, and we expect it to be a meaningful growth area over the next one to three years.
We're also increasingly drawn to working with family offices and foundations directly to help them think strategically about deploying capital into this space. They tend to be nimbler than the big institutional players, more willing to take on risk in pursuit of impact and genuinely looking for opportunities in markets where we already have deep relationships. Helping them build a strategy, find credible opportunities, and deploy capital is a natural extension of what we do — and honestly, it's where some of the most exciting near-term potential is.
Ultimately, we want to help move the market beyond one-off transactions and toward something more like a real investment ecosystem — better pipelines, more diverse capital, financing models that can be replicated across geographies. The challenges in climate, nature, and development are too big for any one player to solve alone. We see our job as bringing the right people together and turning good ideas into real, fundable deals.
