Strategy

Investing at the intersection of climate and gender provides a compelling opportunity to improve the lives of rural women while making climate investments more effective and equitable. We will make co-investments with leading recognized institutions in projects that support women’s empowerment, in renewable energy, water, waste and resource recovery, and sustainable agriculture, and forest management. Projects will issue W+™ credits and or along with GHG credits, that can be monetized to enhance a project’s performance and sustainability, and return profits to investors and women’s groups within each project.

We’ve found that the most effective way to achieve women’s inclusion and gender equality in the environment and agriculture sectors is through the under-resourced local women’s groups that manage activities and resources for women farmers and entrepreneurs. We help these groups to plan, develop leadership skills, and obtain financial resources through climate-related projects. We also help agriculture and environment project implementors to design, implement and measure activities that bring concrete results for women’s empowerment and transformational change for families and communities.

We provide the incentives to under-resourced women’s groups and environmental enterprises with what they need: access to capital; a framework and skills for measuring results; and access to the market for credits that can provide a sustainable revenue stream.

Core to our approach is the deployment of a blend of philanthropic and investment capital. We borrow from mission-oriented lenders willing to accept a low interest rate in return for significant impact and complement it with the philanthropic support that helps cover the remaining costs of building and advising enterprises that are early stage, small, risky, or all of the above.

Innovative Finance

The Fund’s mission is a strategy of designing innovative commercially viable market mechanisms that deliver quantifiable and verifiable benefits to women while providing investors an opportunity to earn a premium on project investments including uniquely designed credits that become tradeable over global environmental market exchanges offering enhanced liquidity. These monetization situations were designed by the founders of the fund and were recognized innovations awarded by the United Nations in 2016. As part of the Fund’s innovative framework, it has the capacity to offer a wide range of financial products that may include grants, concessional loans, subordinated debt, equity, guarantees, potential digital currencies, and creative waterfall structures that help protect our investors’ capital as well as achieve returns in line with market rates. These flexible options enable the Fund to match project needs and adapt to specific investment contexts, to help grow small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).