Shell Foundation is an independent charity, established in 2000 by the Shell Group. It works to create and scale new solutions to global development challenges by applying business thinking to major social and environmental issues linked to energy and mobility.

Learning from both success and failure Shell Foundation has gradually developed a new ‘enterprise-based’ model to catalyse lasting social and environmental impact on a global scale. This sees it deploy a blend of financial and non-financial resources to accelerate transformative innovation and harness private markets to deliver public benefit at scale.

 

Shell Foundation’s Approach

Shell Foundation works with a small number of entrepreneurial partners to identify the underlying market failures behind intractable problems and co-create new social enterprises to solve them.

It provides patient grant funding, extensive business support and access to networks to help pioneers to validate new models, achieve financial independence and expand across geographies. It then creates specialist intermediaries to facilitate growth and replication at an industry level.

By working in this way Shell Foundation now has several strategic partners – addressing issues as diverse as energy access, sustainable mobility and job creation through the SME sector – that are now delivering large-scale impact in multiple countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.