Like many impact investors, the gender-smart community needs to level up when it comes to intersectionality. How might we improve our investment processes and individual understanding to better serve women of colour?

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.

Much has been written about the burden of unpaid care - and its gendered and economic impacts - but it’s not always clear what an investable opportunity looks like, particularly when regional nuances and needs are taken into account. This article explores the current landscape of care and unpaid work as an investment theme and defines prospective roles for funders and investors in both public and private markets.

The constraints imposed by the COVID pandemic have made it difficult to get capital to those who need it most. But several in the gender-smart community and beyond are exploring ways of keeping finance flowing through COVID, by leveraging virtual tools and global networks.

The events this past week—starting with the continued police brutality and murder of George Floyd—expose deep, pervasive, toxic, and systemic racism around the world. Structural racism and abuse of power are two forces that stand to undermine our efforts as individuals and as a community.

Of the emerging financing facilities that have been launched in recent weeks, only a handful have an explicit gender lens - but gender consideration is critical to effective response, recovery and rebuilding post-pandemic.

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.

We speak to Ruth Shaber MD, founder and president of Tara Health Foundation, and co-founder of Rhia Ventures about the ongoing importance of access to reproductive health in the United States, and the ways in which private investment has responded to protect this access in the wake of the pandemic.

On a recent listening tour, we heard perspectives on gender finance in the current crisis from 38 private equity, venture capital, and private debt funds with a gender lens, across 15 countries.

Taking stock of implications for the gender-smart investing community, and reimagining relevant roles for different actors in the ecosystem. Now more than ever it is time to put gender on the table in investment decisions, argues Suzanne Biegel

Ruth Shaber MD is the founder and president of the Tara Health Foundation, which promotes health, well-being, and opportunity for women and girls through innovative evidence-informed programs. She is also the co-founder and board chair of Rhia Ventures, a group of foundations and investors that collaborate to bring new types of capital and enterprise to the field of reproductive health in the United States.

The following conversation took place on February 18, 2020, and is the first of a two-part interview series.

Vicki Saunders launched SheEO in 2015, a perpetual loan fund powered by the ‘radical generosity’ of several activators who each contribute the equivalent of 1,100 dollars (or $92/month) into a pool of capital for women-founded ventures solving social problems (or, as Saunders describes them, ‘the world’s to-do list’). SheEO launched in the UK, their fifth country, in late 2019, and have a pipeline of 70 further countries keen to replicate the model. The long-term goal is to reach a million women activators by the end of this decade, and a billion dollar fund helping 10,000 entrepreneurs every year.