The Building Blocks of a Good Commitment
From the Clinton Global Initiative commitments to the SDGs, commitments to a specific goal or outcome can be an organisational, sectoral, or thematic north star. They help to unite teams and budgets, demonstrate what is possible to the wider field, and build a movement that others want to be part of. And, at a time when investors are being called on to step up for racial justice, they are a way of holding each other accountable and being transparent about our work.
They also take many shapes and sizes - as we saw when over a dozen investors got up on stage at the 2018 GenderSmart Investing Summit, from across public and private markets, to present their commitments to the field. So, to support the launch of the GenderSmart Commitment Tracker, we’re unpacking the common building blocks of a good gender-smart commitment (with some help from our friends) as a framework for others to use.
A lot of the examples below follow the SMART framework - a business cliche for good reason. Is it specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, timely? Katrina Ngo at the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), who worked on commitments at the Clinton Global Initiative, says they should also be new - how is what you’re doing building on rather than duplicating existing efforts? We’d love to hear your thoughts on other criteria or approaches you’ve found useful.
1. Make it Intentional
This ensures that the gender impact is a deliberate outcome rather than a happy accident, whether it’s targeting a 50% women-led pipeline or a 10% increase in supply chain representation. Happy accidents are great but their success is harder to repeat.
2. Make it Additional
Would the outcome of your commitment have happened without your intervention? An oft-debated topic in impact investment, this component is crucial to ensuring measurable advances in gender finance. A lack of additionality is often the source of pink or greenwashing accusations, whereby existing products or efforts are simply repackaged under the guise of gender/climate action. It’s true that persuasive packaging serves a useful purpose in mainstreaming gender finance, but there is little impact beyond this.
3. Make it Measurable
“This isn’t rocket science. I worked on the space shuttle program - I know rocket science. We know how to do this; folks need to make commitments and back them up with numbers. And people need to be held accountable each year on how they’re doing and make changes if they are failing.”
The Impact Management Project (IMP) ABC impact matrix and 2X Criteria are two useful frameworks for approaching measurement. Before the ultimate outcome - whether that’s money moved or individuals influenced - you may also consider defining some milestones along the way to make reporting easier and maintain momentum.
4. Make it Bold But Be Realistic
One investor raising an education financing fund had an ambitious goal around girls’ access to education. During the pilot, they found that local barriers and gender norms would make hitting their target incredibly challenging. If they’d spent four times as much on reaching the numbers, the fund would no longer be viable. Sometimes a bold commitment can galvanise attention, action, and collaboration, but consider whether it's achievable - it might be better to aim for incremental impact and just keep getting better.
5. Make it Collaborative
Build partnerships beyond your organisation. Some of the most powerful commitments we’ve seen involve numerous actors coming together to leverage networks, resources, and capital to have measurably more impact than any single organisation could have done alone.
An impactful commitment needn’t always be about money moved (or not exclusively). Joy Anderson, Criterion Institute, says: “Too often that’s the measure even though it doesn’t actually address whether or not power has shifted. And that in the end for us is the goal. This isn’t actually about how much money moved, this is about how we have transformed systems of power.”
Organisations can shift power by engaging influential individuals and organisations to be advocates or build capacity in others - for example mentoring and TA for women entrepreneurs and fund managers. Tracy Gray at the 22 Fund says, “I'm done with navel gazing. This isn't rocket science. I worked on space shuttles - I know rocket science. We need committed numbers. And people need to be held accountable each year on how they're going to do it.”
Some people we’ve spoken to, particularly within more established institutions, are hesitant to make commitments in case they are seen as token, or pinkwashing. But we recognise that a small change in an investment policy statement and allocation at a 100-year-old family office could involve as much time and resource because of how entrenched perceptions are. This is a sensitive and complex topic with myriad points of view, and everyone has to start somewhere on their gender-smart investing journey.
We’d love to hear what you’re working on - please share a commitment using this form Please note: new funds don’t count as a commitment, unless they demonstrate powerful cross-sectoral collaboration or have an open architecture (i.e. room for many players to benefit from the same infrastructure.)
Image credit: Rita Abreu Photography