These trends are disproportionately reflected in emerging markets. Climate tech is a nascent industry, with most companies < 3 years old at initial funding stage. In the context of huge investments, measuring impact, validating success, and facilitating innovation is essential and achieving these in emerging markets is a greater challenge due to data scarcity.
Data is critical for setting climate strategy; developing plans; tracking progress; and making public disclosures. It helps organisations prioritise paths to net zero. It provides business cases for investment.
The inability to measure impact is prohibiting progress. Complex, messy, and incomplete data limits innovation and investment — and such issues are felt most in emerging markets.
The importance of a more robust, granular and frequent impact measurement is growing every day.
Our toolkit targets the climate data gap, offering robust solutions for comprehensive impact measurement.
Oxford Centre for Technology and Development (OCTD) has developed novel methods to overcome data scarcity and measure the impact of climate-tech companies in emerging markets. OCTD leverages a blend of Oxford and Cambridge expertise to tackle climate-tech data challenges in emerging markets. We utilise advanced methodologies for precise impact assessment, enabling businesses and investors to make informed decisions.
" 66% of companies are unable to quantify their climate impact" (Climate Salad, 2023)
These tailored solutions support investors, corporations, and multinationals to monitor, track and measure the seemingly unquantifiable — ranging from ESG measurement to ROI assessment and infrastructure development. Our partners and clients range from Google, Meta, and United Nations agencies, conducting projects in across Africa, Middle East and Asia, including Jordan, Mongolia, Kenya and Turkey.
Innovation and investment in climate tech is booming. Policymakers are facilitating the private sector to embrace climate technologies and governments are pledging millions to fund climate tech companies.
"A major share of climate mitigation investment in emerging market economies must come from the private sector" (IMF, 2023) 
Founder & Director
Academic at the University of Oxford's Department of International Development.
Fellow, Business Development & Marketing
Said Business School graduate.
Fellow, Green Energy, Adaptation & Climate Finance
SOAS graduate.
Senior Researcher, Marketing & Data Scarcity
Associate professor at Said Business School.
Senior Researcher, Artificial Intelligence
DPhil candidate at University of Oxford's Computer Science Department.
Operations & Qualitative Researcher
University of Oxford graduate.
Senior Computational Social Scientist
Associate professor at the University of Cambridge.
Fellow, ESG and benchmarking
Strategy Director ESG Programs, Duke Corporate Education. Ex-McKinsey
Fellow, Nature-based Solutions
UNDP Nature for Development. University of Oxford graduate.
Co-Founders,DivineOx
Climate Entrepreneur & expert
Tech Executive
Head of ESG and Digital Learning, Duke CE. Ex-McKinsey
We are experts in handling less-than-ideal datasets, measuring impact using specialist methodologies. Our methods stretch from big data analysis to micro-analyses of alternative datasets. Crucial to climate tech and infrastructure development, we actively use satellite, earth observation and remote sensing data to overcome data scarcity in traditional reporting datasets. Our methods are tailored to context, strategy, and aims, broadly categorised into three approaches:
● Interpolation (synthetic interpolation)
● Pooling approaches (e.g., hierarchical models)
● Regularisation and informative priors (academic and industry literature)
● Inertia (an empirical heuristic)
● Data fusion (micro/macro, intertemporal)
● Surrogate models (short and long term)
● Leading indicator data (search interest, social mentions)
● Data enrichment through expert elicitation
● Uncertainty quantification (probabilistic estimates)
● Loss function integration (from “most likely” to “most important”)
We create avatars per company and using our own datasets, we map avatars through each stage of development connecting growth to the resultant impact.
Our approach identifies bottlenecks and successful interventions in company growth.
We project the future impact of the company, enabling a vision of the effects of innovation and investment.
Estimate the real-world impact of innovation capacity building projects and enable tracking of impact in a systematic and simple way.
Our services cater to a diverse range of potential clients, including investors, insurance companies, financial institutions, development banks, and climate tech-focused venture capitalists.
OCTD has raised over £600,000 in 'seed funding' via assignments, operating as a project-led service. Our team is growing and we continue to bring in new clients.
Through continued investment in our own services and technologies, we continue to grow our toolkit to overcome data scarcity and measure the impact of climate-tech companies in emerging markets.
Over the next 24-months, OCTD will develop an AI-powered data management platform, aiming to revolutionise climate-tech impact measurement and establish new industry benchmarks.