Tatjana Gerling, 2X Global’s Ambassador for Japan, shares her thoughts with 2X Global about responsible investing, the investment landscape in Japan and the opportunities to build upon and strengthen the gender lens investing ecosystem in Japan.

Halla Tómasdóttir is CEO and Chief Change Catalyst for The B Team, a group of global business and civil society leaders driving a better way of doing business for the well-being of people and the planet. As well as having leadership roles in Corporate America with M&M and Pepsi Cola, Halla was the first female CEO of the Iceland Chamber of Commerce and later went on to co-found Auður Capital, an investment firm with the vision of incorporating feminine values into finance. In 2016, Tómasdóttir was an independent candidate for President of Iceland, earning nearly 30% of the vote.

Halla joined GenderSmart to share her thoughts on the changes (or lack thereof) she has seen within the gender lens investing world over the past fifteen years, why we need to embrace feminine models of leadership and why she believes that quotas can benefit everyone.

As we open the GenderSmart Investing Summit 2022 today, Suzanne Biegel reflects on the key actions needed to move the field forward and shift the needle in both numbers and impact. What do we most need to do to move more capital with more velocity and to greater effect?

Lilian Mramba is Regional Director, Africa at Grassroots Business Fund, where she manages the investment portfolio, business advisory, and impact measurement activities. She spoke to us about the gender finance challenges and opportunities on the continent in the wake of COVID, and the need for more rigorous analysis to prevent ‘genderwashing’.

Women of the World Endowment (WoWE) was created with a bold vision—build a $5B endowment, over the next 10 years, to centralise the role of women as economic, environmental, and social changemakers who are creating a high growth future. Investment Manager Pooja Eppanapally spoke to us about mainstreaming gender finance, evolving definitions, and their approach to impact and measurement.

If you take a quick glance at the agri businesses in West-Africa, what you see is a male dominated sector. Typically, financiers look at who sells the commodities (men), who is registered as owner of the land (men). and who is more likely to have a full-time written contract (men). It’s as if women do not exist in the agri value chains. But the opposite is true.

A focus on equality and gender has to be an integral part of green investments and policy actions, not an addition or afterthought. EBRD write about their work to integrate gender across a range of programmes over the last year, providing financing, policy dialogue and technical assistance.

Governments and the international development community now have a once in a generation opportunity to prioritize clean energy investments in recovery plans and stimulus packages, writes Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All (SEforAll) and Co-Chair of UN-Energy.

The modernisation of agribusiness value chains must take a gender-progressive approach, which requires a shift in the investment landscape to better integrate gender, from capitalising women-led companies to ensuring women farmers are empowered across the value chain.

Just as the crises of a lack of access to clean water and sanitation and of gender inequality compound each other, the solutions are symbiotic. Women are the key to solving the water crisis, and the co-authors of this article have come together as three voices from the philanthropic and impact investing communities to advocate for increased investment in, and representation of, women.

In July and August 2020, WOCAN produced a podcast series – "10 Solutions for a Feminist Climate- resilient Recovery – featuring ten international thought-leaders who shared their views on how to reimagine and reshape our future from a feminist approach. These ten podcasts present concrete and bold solutions and call for urgent actions, summarised here.

This article is part of a series from contributors to GenderSmart’s Gender and Climate Investment Working Group. For most, Gender and Climate Investing is a new field, but there is already a lot of great work underway. By showcasing powerful examples from across the investment ecosystem, Working Group contributors are using their voices in the lead up to February’s GenderSmart Investing Summit and beyond to highlight the important role a combined gender and climate lens can play in delivering a just, green economy transition.

The blue economy - sustainable activity related to the world’s oceans - is on a lot of investors’ minds right now. It’s also an arena in which women are often significantly excluded and underestimated.

We speak to Agnetha “Jaime” Gloshay and Vanessa Roanhorse, Co-Founders of Native Women Lead, an organisation dedicated to supporting and growing Native American women entrepreneurs and leaders, about Indigenous economies, the challenges facing Native women, and the importance of letting Native women lead.

Increasingly, we see how racial injustice intersects with gender and class injustice to create communities of people who are members of multiple disadvantaged communities. Any programme that targets injustice in one community – women, for example – is significantly more effective if it takes an intersectional approach. What implications does this have for gender and climate impact investment?

If we don’t start taking an integrated approach to gender and climate investment, this moment in history won’t just be remembered for COVID-19: it might be remembered as the year we lost our planet.