Morgan Stanley Announces Inaugural Winners of the Sustainable Solutions Award and Collaborative

The Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing (the Institute) today announced the inaugural cohort of its Sustainable Solutions Collaborative (the Collaborative), an initiative to identify breakthrough innovations that address systemic change to support sustainability. Spanning Africa, and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America, the five winners will participate in a bespoke yearlong strategic collaboration with the Institute where they will tap into the full range of Morgan Stanley’s expertise, networks and resources to help them achieve scale. Each winner will also receive an award of $250,000 to increase the impact and reach of their initiative.

Each member of the Sustainable Solutions Collaborative was selected for developing a breakthrough concept aimed at solving critical global challenges. The five inaugural participants of the 2021 Sustainable Solutions Collaborative come from a diverse group of organizations and backgrounds:

• Mpharma, a Ghana-based health tech startup is revolutionizing the drug supply chain in Africa taking the tools that make ecommerce convenient and profitable to make healthcare accessible and affordable.
• MySOC, a project of Skidmore College and Michigan State University, is harnessing unprecedented amounts of diverse data types to answer foundational questions about soil carbon to create a new market in partnership with farmers truly committed to sustainability.
• Siklus is tackling the nexus of poverty and plastic waste in Indonesia, remapping the relationship between consumers and producers to prove that affordable and convenient doesn’t need to mean throw away.
• SunCulture, based in Kenya, is bringing together innovations in inclusive finance, renewable energy and sustainable agriculture to help small holder farmers in Africa be more profitable and more sustainable.
• Trees As Infrastructure, Trees As Infrastructure, an open source platform by Dark Matter Labs, based in the UK and operating across Europe, is establishing nature as a critical part of urban infrastructure, alongside bridges, roads and rail, enabling it to be investable, profitable and sustainable.

“Each one of these initiatives, which range from commercial to nonprofit, has developed remarkable innovations. Through the help of the Collaborative, they have the potential to create the systemic changes needed to create a more sustainable future,” said Audrey Choi, Chief Sustainability Officer and CEO of the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing. “We admire their creative thinking and dedication, and look forward to working with them to help bring their solutions to scale.”