It only launched last year, but The Rise Fund was all over the agenda at the October Social Capital Markets conference, which draws investors and entrepreneurs to San Francisco each year to discuss issues at the intersection of money and meaning.

Blended capital is the use of philanthropic or official aid money inside a financial structure that has the effect of pulling private investment into the same structure where it normally wouldn’t have gone because risk is too high, the rewards aren’t calibrated for the risks, or so on.

The $2 billion social impact fund is the result of a collaboration between Bill McGlashan, a partner at the private equity firm TPG and co-founder of The Rise Fund; Bono, the musician turned activist and investor; and Jeff Skoll, the first employee and president at eBay whose legacy in philanthropy includes the Skoll Foundation in Palo Alto.

There is a $2.5 trillion a year gap in the money needed to finance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This represents just 1 percent of what is in the international capital markets on any given day, meaning the global development community is exploring new ways to engage the private sector in order to solve these problems by 2030.

Read the full article by Catherine Cheney at Devex International Development