One billion children live in countries facing high climate risk. UNICEF wants your open-source solution to change that.
The UNICEF Venture Fund is on the hunt. For this funding call, the organization is seeking climate-focused startups from emerging markets that are building open-source frontier technology solutions—artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and beyond—with the potential to create radical, measurable change for children.
If your company is registered in a UNICEF programme country, has a working prototype, and is committed to open-source licensing, you could receive up to $100,000 in equity-free funding.
Women-led startups and young founders are especially encouraged to apply.
But don’t wait. The deadline is May 17, 2026.
Quick Summary for Busy Founders
- What: Up to $100,000 equity-free funding for climate-focused frontier tech startups
- Who: Companies registered in UNICEF programme countries with working prototypes and open-source commitment
- Priority: AI, machine learning, blockchain, IoT solutions in strategic planning, early warning, healthcare readiness, or point-of-care support
- Special encouragement: Women-led startups and young founders
- Deadline: May 17, 2026
The Scale of the Problem: Why Children Need Climate Tech Now
Let the numbers sink in.
One billion children—roughly half the world’s child population—live in countries facing extremely high climate and environmental risk. That’s not a distant threat. It’s today’s reality.
Even more startling: 466 million children, or about one in five worldwide, now live in areas experiencing at least twice as many days of extreme heat (above 35°C or 95°F) compared with the 1960s. Heat isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s deadly. It disrupts health services, contaminates water, spoils food, and keeps kids out of school.
Floods. Droughts. Air pollution. Wildfires. Each climate shock intensifies existing vulnerabilities—malnutrition, disease, displacement. And yet, children remain drastically underrepresented in the design of the very technologies meant to protect them.
That’s the gap the UNICEF Venture Fund intends to fill.
The Need: A Five-Year Commitment to Child-Centric Climate Innovation
This call for applications is not a one-off. It’s the first installment of a five-year Climate Ventures investment programme dedicated exclusively to catalyzing child-centric climate solutions.
The goal? Identify and invest in scalable, open-source technologies that protect children’s health, enhance preparedness and anticipatory action, and improve coordination and resilience across health, education, and basic services.
The climate innovation landscape is expanding rapidly. Investment is flowing into frontier tech, data-driven solutions, and climate ventures. But much of that innovation fails to prioritize child-specific risks or the on-the-ground realities of climate-affected communities in emerging markets.
Climate Ventures aims to shift that trajectory—putting children at the center of climate technology, not the margins.
What UNICEF Is Looking For: Four Priority Areas
The Venture Fund is actively seeking startups pushing boundaries with frontier technologies that are innovative, scalable, and globally relevant. Recognizing the multidimensional threats climate change poses to children, UNICEF has organized this call around four key investment areas.
Area 1: Strategic Planning
UNICEF wants solutions that strengthen climate and environmental hazard mapping—from global down to the community level. Think vulnerability scores for health facilities, schools, and neighborhoods. Think pollution hotspot identification.
Example solutions might include:
- Social and behavioural change tools that translate massive climate and health data sets into clear, localized guidance for communities and public authorities.
- Open, interoperable, AI-driven carbon accounting tools that allow local actors to measure and report emissions themselves.
- Mapping tools that overlay flood, heat, air quality, and power outage risks against national health facility registries, creating AI-ready databases.
- Frontier tech models that optimize the delivery of limited resources during climate responses—forecasts paired with service planning.
- Digital tools that assess and reduce the carbon footprint of healthcare value chains, linking pollution exposure data directly to child health outcomes.
Area 2: Early Warning, Early Action
In a climate crisis, hours matter. UNICEF is seeking tools and platforms that deliver hyper-local climate and environmental data to local governments, community leaders, and schools—air pollution alerts, UV indexes, heat and humidity warnings, flood and storm early warnings, even disease outbreak alerts that trigger disaster relief.
Example solutions might include:
- Early warning systems for climate-sensitive health risks like vector-borne diseases (malaria, dengue), zoonoses, and heat-related illness, powered by predictive analytics and real-time data.
- AI- and blockchain-enabled parametric insurance or disaster financing mechanisms that use anomaly detection, climate telemetry, and automated triggers to fund rapid response during climate-related health shocks.
- Decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs)—think weather or air-quality stations deployed in schools and health facilities—that generate trusted local data to trigger smart contract–based responses or community incentive models.
Area 3: Healthcare Readiness
When a heatwave hits or a malaria outbreak begins, health systems need to know before the surge arrives. UNICEF is seeking novel technologies for predictive analysis and forecasting to help national and regional authorities prepare.
Example solutions might include:
- Open-source, AI-driven “Forecast-in-a-Box” early warning tools ready to deploy in low-resource or emergency settings.
- AI-driven anomaly detection for pollution measurement—air quality, lead contamination in soil, and beyond.
- Low-cost, ready-to-deploy IoT sensors linked to anticipatory action protocols for schools, health facilities, and public spaces, combining air quality, temperature, humidity, and UV data.
- Climate-sensitive forecasting models for infectious diseases and heat-related illnesses, linked directly to public health decision-making and surge planning (such as integration with DHIS2, the world’s largest health management information system).
- Platforms that model trends linking pollution and environmental damage to epidemiological spread—including correlations with asthma development in toddlers and other lung diseases.
Area 4: Point-of-Care Support
Data is only useful if people can access, interpret, and act on it. UNICEF is looking for data-driven solutions that help local authorities and communities share trusted climate and health information and receive behavioural health nudges.
Example solutions might include:
- Locally trained or fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) that generate region-specific climate health insights for local governments, operating in multiple languages with the ability to function offline or in low-bandwidth environments.
- Decentralized decision-making systems that enable communities to retain self-custody of their own health and climate-related data, including consent-based data sharing for research or AI development.
What You Get: $100,000 Equity-Free and Open-Source Commitment
Selected startups receive up to $100,000 in equity-free funding. That means UNICEF takes no ownership stake in your company. The money is yours to deploy toward research, development, deployment, and scaling.
In exchange, your solution must be committed to open-source licensing and practices. The Venture Fund believes that technologies designed for children—especially in climate-vulnerable settings—should be freely accessible, adaptable, and improvable by local communities and governments worldwide.
Who Can Apply: Eligibility at a Glance
Your company must be:
- Registered in a UNICEF programme country (this includes most countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East—essentially any nation where UNICEF actively operates).
- Climate-focused, with a solution that addresses one or more of the four priority areas above.
- Building with frontier technology—AI, machine learning, blockchain, IoT, or other advanced tools.
- At the early-stage but ready-to-deploy, meaning you already have a working prototype. This is not for napkin sketches or early ideation.
- Committed to open-source licensing and open practices.
Women-led startups and young founders are especially encouraged to apply. UNICEF is actively working to close gender and age gaps in climate tech funding.
How to Apply
Applications are submitted through the UNICEF Venture Fund portal. You will need to describe your solution, its stage of development, your team, your commitment to open source, and how your technology addresses one or more of the four climate priority areas.
Apply here: (Link available on UNICEF’s Venture Fund website)
Why This Matters: A Generation at Risk
Behind every statistic is a child. The boy on a makeshift raft in Tarawa, Kiribati, whose home is disappearing beneath rising seas. The girl in the Sahel whose school closed because of drought. The toddler in South Asia whose lungs are developing amid toxic air.
Wealthier nations, communities, and adult priorities have largely designed climate technology. The UNICEF Venture Fund is trying to change that—one open-source solution at a time.
“If you’re building something that can protect children from extreme heat, predict a malaria outbreak before it spreads, or help a community keep its health clinic running during a flood,” the fund’s messaging suggests, “they want to hear from you.”
