Beyond Inclusion: Can Gender Lens Investing Deliver Feminist Futures?
by Carolina Robino, Senior Programme Specialist, IDRC & Jessica Espinoza, CEO, 2X Global
Over the past decade, gender lens investing (GLI) has evolved from a niche concept into an increasingly established approach across the investment landscape, engaging both impact-focused and mainstream investors. Dedicated funds have emerged, the 2X Criteria have provided a common framework, and development finance institutions, foundations, and private investors increasingly recognise women as entrepreneurs, employees, suppliers and consumers — while the field has progressively expanded its focus towards the quality and depth of gender impact.
Alongside this growth, a more sophisticated conversation has begun to emerge about what success actually looks like. In their editorial introducing the special issue Gender Lens Investing in Emerging Markets, Ted Jackson and I (Carolina) argued for a deeper understanding of the pathways through which investment contributes to transformative gender outcomes. The question is no longer simply whether capital reaches women, but what changes as a result — and under what conditions finance can help reshape the structures that reproduce inequality.
This question comes at a particularly important moment. Aid budgets are shrinking. Backlash against gender equality and women’s rights is growing in many contexts. Climate impacts are intensifying. And development actors are increasingly being asked to mobilise private capital to fill financing gaps.
At the same time, we are seeing the emergence of investing for systems change — approaches that look beyond the impact of individual investments to consider how capital, often alongside other forms of intervention, can address root causes and contribute to broader systems transformation.
Against this backdrop, a fundamental question is becoming harder to ignore: Has gender lens investing become a tool for making finance more gender-aware, or can it become a tool for transforming the systems that drive gender inequality?
From Investing in Women to Transforming Systems
Over the past decade, the GLI field has significantly expanded both its reach and its ambition. The field has evolved from a strong focus on women’s participation in and benefit from investment — including through ownership, leadership, quality employment, access to products and services, and participation in supply chains — towards a more comprehensive understanding of gender impact. Increasingly, this also includes a stronger lens on issues such as care, health and wellbeing, gender-based violence, and intersectional diversity. Frameworks such as the 2X Criteria and, more recently, 2X Certification reflect this evolution towards a broader and deeper understanding of gender impact.
Yet there is further to go. Inclusion and transformation are not synonymous. If capital reaches women-owned SMEs, does it reduce unequal care responsibilities? If women gain access to finance, does it increase agency, ownership, and decision-making power? If an investment qualifies as gender-smart, what changes in institutions, markets, or social norms follow? These questions deserve greater attention.
As the field continues to evolve, an important next frontier for research and practice is to better understand the pathways through which investment contributes to transformative outcomes and lasting shifts in power relations, economic structures, and systems of inequality. As highlighted in the Gender Lens Investing in Emerging Markets special issue, this requires moving beyond a focus on capital deployment alone. The editorial introducing the special issue further argues that achieving such outcomes requires greater attention to localisation and Southern-led approaches, including shifting decision-making power, knowledge production, and investment priorities toward actors and institutions rooted in the Global South.
The Tension at the Heart of the Debate
“At the same time, feminist movements have brought additional questions into sharper focus.
Who controls capital?
Who bears risk?
Who captures value?
Who owns assets?
Who performs unpaid care?
Who defines impact?
Who benefits? ”
Gender-smart investing has long grappled with priorities such as unlocking private capital, demonstrating the business and impact case for gender equality, managing investment risk, and increasing investable opportunities. At the same time, feminist movements have brought additional questions into sharper focus: Who controls capital? Who bears risk? Who captures value? Who owns assets? Who performs unpaid care? Who defines impact? Who benefits?
Increasingly, these conversations are converging. That creates an opportunity not to choose between investment and feminist perspectives, but to ask how each can challenge and strengthen the other.
These questions point to a larger tension: can financial systems primarily designed around risk-adjusted returns fully support feminist visions of justice, care, redistribution, and collective wellbeing?
This is not an argument against private investment. Rather, it is an argument for recognising that different forms of capital serve different purposes. Not every gender equality challenge can — or should — be made investable.
Women's rights organisations, feminist movements, and grassroots networks generate public goods, social change, and democratic accountability, and their funding is shrinking. They are unlikely ever to become investable in conventional terms. Their contributions cannot be measured through financial returns alone. Feminist finance cannot simply mean mobilising more commercial investment. It requires thinking more strategically about the complementary roles of grants, philanthropy, public finance, blended finance, and commercial capital, and the sequencing and coordination amongst these different forms of capital. And this requires that feminist actors and gender smart investors sit together at the same table.
Why Local Leadership Matters
Another lesson emerging from the evolution of the field is that transformative outcomes are often driven by local leadership rather than imported models.
Through their respective work, IDRC and 2X Global have increasingly focused on strengthening women-led and locally anchored fund managers and investment approaches across the Global South. Through the Resilient Futures Fund, 2X Global is mobilising capital to back women-led fund managers and businesses advancing gender and climate outcomes, while the 2X Ignite Africa Warehousing Facility provides catalytic capital to emerging women fund managers on the African continent. IDRC, meanwhile, has supported the strengthening of locally anchored investment ecosystems and women-led fund managers investing at the intersection of climate and gender. Building on this work, a joint IDRC–2X Global action research initiative is exploring locally rooted capital solutions and investment vehicles led by women fund managers across the Global South. These efforts reflect a shared recognition that those closest to local markets are often best positioned to identify opportunities, understand risks, build trust with entrepreneurs, and design investment approaches that respond to local realities rather than external assumptions.
This shift matters because development finance has frequently focused on transferring models across contexts. Yet transformative change cannot simply be imported. It needs to be rooted in local knowledge, institutions, leadership and innovation.
As climate, gender, and development challenges become increasingly interconnected, locally led investment approaches offer important lessons about how capital can be deployed in ways that strengthen agency, ownership, and resilience while responding to context-specific realities.
Care as a key Frontier of Impact Investing
A key frontier for feminist finance is care. Women's economic participation depends on childcare, eldercare, long-term care services, paid care workers, and care infrastructure. Without addressing how care responsibilities are distributed, economic inclusion strategies will always face limits or reinforce inequalities.
Care shifts the discussion from investing in women toward investing in the conditions that make equality possible. For investors, this does not only mean identifying care as an investable sector. It also means understanding care as an enabling condition across investments: who is able to participate in the workforce, access economic opportunities, build a business, or benefit from an economic transition is profoundly shaped by the availability, affordability and distribution of care.
Over the last several years, IDRC and its partners have helped advance research and policy discussions on transformative caring economies and systems, exploring how care intersects with employment, social protection, agriculture, climate change, infrastructure[1] , clean energy, and economic development. This work has brought a critical insight into investment conversations: economies depend on care; care is the critical economic infrastructure that allows all other work to happen. It highlights forms of infrastructure that are essential for productivity, resilience, and inclusive growth. Yet traditional financial models often fail to recognise its value.
A programme on care and impact investing highlights how mobilising impact investing in care presents both an opportunity and a challenge, raising important questions about how investors, corporate actors, employers and blended finance can support care systems and became co-responsible, without accelerating the financialisation of care, or undermining care as a public good.
Just Transition Finance: Beyond Green Growth
The rapid rise of just transition finance presents another important opportunity to rethink what transformative investment could look like. As governments, investors, and financial institutions commit to supporting the transition to low-carbon economies, just transition frameworks are increasingly being used. For some, just transition is about protecting workers and communities affected by economic restructuring. For others, it offers a framework for integrating climate, social equity, and gender outcomes into capital allocation decisions. At its core, however, just transition asks a fundamental question: Who benefits from economic transformation, who bears its costs, who captures value, and who has a voice in shaping the transition?
This perspective creates an important bridge between feminist finance and climate finance. Too often, climate-gender discussions focus narrowly on women entrepreneurs in green sectors or women's access to climate-related jobs. Less attention is paid to ownership, governance, decision-making power, unequal adaptation burdens, and the distribution of benefits generated by the green transition. A gender-transformative vision of just transition goes further. It moves beyond asking whether women are included in new economic opportunities and instead examines the underlying conditions that determine who can participate, who can influence decisions, and who captures value from climate investments.
In practice, this could mean looking beyond the number of women employed by a renewable energy investment to ask who owns the assets, who participates in and benefits from the supply chain, who has a voice in decision-making, how benefits are distributed, and whether care and other structural constraints shape who can access the opportunities created.
The Climate-Care Nexus
An important contribution emerging from IDRC-supported work is the growing understanding of the climate-care nexus. Climate shocks increase care demands and make care provision more complex. Extreme weather events, food insecurity, water scarcity, health impacts, and displacement intensify unpaid care responsibilities, much of which continues to be carried by women and girls. At the same time, care work itself builds climate resilience. Yet these dynamics remain largely invisible in mainstream climate finance.
Viewing care as enabling infrastructure for a just transition changes the conversation. Care is not a social add-on. It is an economic foundation that shapes workforce participation, productivity, resilience, and access to emerging opportunities. Investments in care systems influence who can participate in climate transitions and under what conditions.
This lens also invites investors to broaden how they define success. Rather than measuring only emissions reductions or numbers of beneficiaries, a gender-transformative just transition would consider changes in economic opportunity, ownership, representation, agency, influence, and resilience.
At a time when gender risks being diluted within broader climate and transition agendas, just transition finance offers an opportunity to elevate questions that conventional climate finance has often overlooked: care, livelihoods, representation, local ownership, and agency.
Building Financing Ecosystems, Not Single Solutions
Some of the most promising innovations are emerging from financing ecosystems that intentionally combine grants, philanthropy, technical assistance, public and catalytic finance, and investment capital, such as the Equality Fund. Rather than treating these approaches as competing alternatives, they recognise that different objectives require different forms of financing — and that sequencing, coordination and risk-sharing between them can be as important as the individual instruments themselves.
Over the past decade, initiatives such as the Women's Voice and Leadership Program and other feminist funding mechanisms have demonstrated the importance of sustained, flexible support for feminist organising and movement building. These investments create the enabling conditions that make broader transformations possible, whether in economic inclusion, political participation, care systems, or climate justice. IDRC and Global Affairs Canada’s Women’s Voice and Leadership Learning Partnership is building the evidence base around what works and does not work for feminist and gender-equality movements striving to advance, sustain and defend women’s human rights and gender justice around the world.
“In a world increasingly focused on mobilising private capital, there is a risk of viewing investment as the solution to every financing challenge.
Yet advancing gender equality will require robust financing ecosystems that recognise the complementary roles of commercial capital, public finance, philanthropy, and direct support to women’s rights organisations and feminist movements.”
In a world increasingly focused on mobilising private capital, there is a risk of viewing investment as the solution to every financing challenge. Yet advancing gender equality will require robust financing ecosystems that recognise the complementary roles of commercial capital, public finance, philanthropy, and direct support to women's rights organisations and feminist movements. [2] Approaches centred on new ownership models, including steward and community ownership, solidarity economies, cooperative structures, and collective wealth building, suggest that it is possible to place ownership, agency, democratic participation, and shared prosperity at the centre of economic transformation. For example, women's producer and worker cooperatives, including those supported by the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in India among informal workers and caregivers, enable members to collectively own productive assets, exercise democratic control, improve working conditions, and share profits more equitably. Similarly, collective land and housing initiatives led through Slum Dwellers International across countries including South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda have strengthened women's access to land, housing, and community infrastructure while increasing their voice in local governance and development decisions. These examples illustrate how alternative ownership models can shift who owns assets, participates in decision-making, and benefits from value creation, while strengthening communities' capacity to retain and distribute wealth more fairly.
The Conversation We Need Now
The financing gap for gender equality is growing precisely as development actors and feminist movements are being asked to rely more heavily on private capital. At the same time, climate change, democratic erosion, shrinking aid budgets and backlash against gender equality and women’s rights are creating new pressures on the institutions and movements driving progress. As argued in a recent report by the Gender Funds Co-Lab, this context urges a conversation on if and how innovative financial approaches can strengthen the women’s rights and gender justice ecosystem.
For the gender lens investing field, the question is therefore not simply how we mobilise more capital, but how we mobilise it in ways that deepen impact while recognising where commercial finance can — and cannot — drive change. Three questions feel particularly important for the next phase of the field: How can we mobilise capital at scale while deepening its contribution to transformative gender outcomes? How can feminist actors, locally led fund managers and the people affected by investments have greater influence over how capital is designed and deployed? And how can commercial capital, public finance and philanthropy work together, with each playing the role for which it is best suited? Some of these questions were also at the heart of recent discussions at Women Deliver and will require continued dialogue across the gender lens investing and feminist finance communities.
More than a decade into the growth of gender lens investing, the field stands at an inflection point. The challenge is no longer only to increase the volume of capital flowing with a gender lens. It is also to understand under what conditions gender-smart finance can contribute to transformative gender equality and strengthen the women’s rights ecosystem.
Building on lessons from feminist finance, gender lens investing, locally led investment models, care-centred development, and the emerging intersection of climate, care, and just transition finance, the next phase of the field requires deepening our focus beyond questions of access to questions of power, ownership, care, agency, and collective wellbeing. Because the future of the field is not only about moving more capital. It is about understanding and advancing the kinds of finance capable of supporting feminist futures.
