About 1 billion children live in countries facing high climate and environmental risk, and 466 million children now live in areas experiencing at least twice as many extreme heat days as their grandparents did in the 1960s. Yet children remain largely absent from the design of the climate technologies meant to protect them.
UNICEF Ventures Funding
The Climate Ventures call for applications is offering up to US$100,000 in equity-free funding to early-stage startups building open-source frontier tech solutions at the intersection of climate and child health. This is the first cohort in a five-year Climate Ventures investment program focused on child-centric climate innovation.
The Venture Fund is looking for AI, machine learning, blockchain, and other frontier tech solutions ready to deploy in low-resource or emergency settings across four areas:
- Strategic planning: hazard mapping, vulnerability scoring for health facilities and schools, AI-driven carbon accounting, and pollution hotspot identification
- Early warning, early action: hyperlocal alerts for floods, heat, air pollution, and disease outbreaks, including parametric insurance and decentralized sensor networks (DePINs) in schools and clinics
- Healthcare readiness: predictive analytics for malaria, dengue, heatwave morbidity surges, and respiratory illness from wildfire smoke or dust storms
- Point-of-care support: offline-capable LLMs for community health workers, multilingual triage systems, and consent-based data sharing tools
Startups must be registered in one of UNICEF’s programme countries, have a working prototype, and commit to open-source licensing. UNICEF is explicitly encouraging women-led startups and young founders to apply.
Application deadline: 17 May 2026
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