A practical playbook for business-led blended finance, featuring W2AF

This week the UN Global Compact’s CFO Coalition for the SDGs published Business-Led Blended Finance: A Practical Playbook, and the Water Access Acceleration Fund (W2AF) features among its case studies. 

Most guidance on blended finance has been written for the institutions that provide concessional capital: governments, development finance institutions and multilateral development banks. The companies that build and run the projects on the ground have had far less to work from. The Playbook sets out to change that, giving real economy companies a practical route into structuring blended finance transactions rather than only receiving the funding. It was released during the London Climate Action Week 2026. 

W2AF appears as a worked example of how the model can be put into practice. Described in the Playbook as the first private equity blended finance fund dedicated to scaling water-access businesses, W2AF has, through its first two investments, in Rite Water Solutions in India and Spouts International in Uganda and Rwanda, supported around 9 billion litres of safe drinking water reaching 11 million people on low incomes. The Playbook looks closely at the Rite Water investment, where EUR 7.5 million in equity from W2AF helped mobilise more than EUR 14 million in follow-on equity and commercial bank debt, nearly twice the size of the investment itself. It is a clear illustration of how catalytic capital can bring further private investment in behind it. 

Recognition of this kind matters because it comes from outside our own ecosystem. The blended finance market has grown from around USD 14 billion in 2020 to USD 24 billion in 2024, yet it remains some way short of the scale the need requires. Seeing W2AF set alongside other structures as a practical reference point is a useful signal that the approach holds up, and that the water access it supports is real and measurable. 

We are grateful to the UN Global Compact and the CFO Coalition team for their work on the Playbook, and to Aqua for All for the introduction that began this collaboration. 

The Playbook is available to download from the UN Global Compact: https://info.unglobalcompact.org/blended-finance-2026