Over 1,000 influential civil servants, regulators, and representatives from civil society have undertaken a course with the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group, part of Oxford University, over the last 12 months, enabled by philanthropic funding from the IKEA Foundation and the European Climate Foundation.
The course has armed participants across the world with knowledge, networks and skills to help shift the direction of global capital away from unsustainable activities to those aligned with the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The University of Oxford Public and Third Sector Academy for Sustainable Finance (P3SA) launched its Introduction to Sustainable Finance Course in May 2021 and has since taught people from 82 countries and more than 250 organisations.
Over 40% of participants are from the global south including 32 from the Philippines Development Bank, 31 from Kenya’s central bank and capital markets regulator, 22 from Thailand’s central bank, 18 from Indonesia’s central bank, 14 from Egypt’s financial regulator, and 11 from Nigeria’s finance ministry.
The P3SA was established by the University of Oxford to be a global centre for learning and capacity building that enables public and third sector organisations to understand, and grasp the associated opportunities of, sustainable finance.
“The public and third sectors will not be able to help global economic and financial systems deliver better sustainability outcomes if they do not understand finance and investment,” explains Dr Ben Caldecott, Faculty Chair of P3SA and the Lombard Odier Associate Professor of Sustainable Finance at the University of Oxford.
“The public and third sectors urgently need to develop broader and more in-depth capabilities in finance generally and sustainable finance in particular. This is currently a major capability gap and a persistent structural weakness that needs to be addressed systematically over time,” he added.