The Kulawan Initiative

Our journey to deploy catalytic capital for nature positive organisations in Asia which are striving to restore balance between humans and nature to benefit all life on our planet

Our journey to deploy catalytic capital for nature-positive organisations in Asia which are striving to restore balance between humans and nature to benefit all life on our planet

About Kulawan

Kulawan is a nature catalytic capital programme. We provide flexible, patient, and risk-tolerant funding that best suits the needs of nature-positive ventures, fund managers, or projects, ultimately seeking to address their most challenging capital needs and help “bridge” them to the next stage of funding.

With equity and debt capital, we are willing to take on higher levels of risk while accepting moderate financial returns. Our intention is to provide organisations with the right capital to prove their commercial and impact models and over time, enabling them to hopefully attract more investments and like-minded partners to support their growth and scale their impact.

Through building a learning portfolio of catalytic capital investments, Kulawan aspires to benefit the wider field and enable these learnings to be shared with others who are curious about deploying this type of capital.

Why Kulawan?

Kulawan aims to support the global movement seeking to build a new economic system which is centred on a just and regenerative world and which operates within healthy planetary boundaries .

Through our experience so far, we believe in order to achieve this and address the significant financing gap for nature and biodiversity, traditional philanthropic grants and market rate impact investment capital are not enough. Hence, we focus on supporting emerging business models in Asia which do not extract from nature and have a strong focus on benefitting local communities.

Furthermore, from listening to actors in the sector and our learnings so far, we believe there are gaps in the sector which we are aiming to address. These include:

Lack of patient and flexible capital (i.e. restrictive grants or conventional investment capital seeking market rate returns)

Lack of funding for first-time fund managers and/or new strategies of existing managers

Lack of readily available follow-on capital

Lack of capacity building support (e.g. venture building services)

Lack of nature-based venture and fund managers in Asia with enough scale to attract larger and more commercial investors

Kulawan’s Themes of Focus

We support organisations in Asia which are addressing the following priority

areas informed by science:

1

Sustainable Agriculture and Land Use

2

Ecosystem Protection and Restoration

We aim to support the ‘doers’

Kulawan seeks to support the ‘doers’, the individuals who are working on-the-ground with nature and developing new business models which focus on local communities and do not extract from our planet.


We have a particular focus on Asia-based or -focused:

Ventures

Seed to Pre-Series A.

Fund Managers

First or second time fund managers.

New strategies of existing fund managers.

Kulawan’s Focus

We support Asia-based or -focused organisations which are values and mission aligned to RS Group.

The main outcomes we are focusing on are:

Environmental and Social (E&S) Impact – contributing to reducing or preventing CO2e emissions, increasing social and livelihood benefits of local communities, enhancing,  and protecting more of our planet’s biodiversity.

Teams and Operating Models – increasing more local talented individuals and teams in Asia to develop and scale non-extractive new types of operating / business models.

Additionality – we invest in areas where most others are not able to go, meeting real funding gap needs, and leveraging our network to benefit our partners beyond just financial support.

Our Current Partners

What Does Kulawan Mean?

The term “kulaw-wan” comes from a third indigenous language used by the Manobo Indigenous Peoples of Mindanao, Philippines. It refers to “environment” or “nature” and reflects their belief that land is life itself – alive and a source of all life.

Source: Droz, L., Chen, HM., Chu, HT. etal. Exploring the diversity of conceptualizations of nature in East and South-East Asia. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9, 186 (2022)