COVID has accentuated the importance of building resilient and sustainable supply chains - an aspiration which can only be achieved by diversifying and appropriately financing scalable diverse, local, women-owned, -led, and -impact businesses.

We sat down with Jennifer Choi, Managing Director of Industry Affairs for the Institutional Limited Partners Association (ILPA), to discuss their Diversity in Action initiative, the challenges of capturing diversity metrics in a global context, and the actions LPs and GPs can implement to advance diversity, equity and inclusion.

The five-year Pacific RISE program, an Australian Government DFAT funded initiative in partnership with Criterion Institute, is coming to an end in July 2021. The program, focused on building the impact investment market in the Pacific, found a number of challenges in implementing a gender lens in investment endemic to impact investing as a whole. In addressing these, Pacific RISE generated influential new insights and transferable learnings for gender lens investors worldwide.

Investors often gravitate toward opportunities in technology, energy and financial services as the best way to deploy their $1 billion impact funds. The result, says Laura Callanan, is that impact investors are missing the large swath of the global economy where women, youth, indigenous peoples, and others can be found: the creative economy.

The COVID-19 Pandemic made a significant impact on gender lens investing over the last year. GenderSmart’s Suzanne Biegel and VC Include’s Bahiyah Yasmeen Robinson share learnings from the Capital Connect ‘un-showcases’ to date, and the massive market opportunity in gender-smart private market (VC, PE, private debt) investment funds.

It’s time to reverse the burden of case-making by asking mainstream investors to justify their weddedness to legacy approaches and allocations.

Last year, our pathways to employment report highlighted the need to rebuild the social infrastructure around adolescent girls and young women by rethinking how we invest in products and services. Similarly, the persistent gender digital divide calls for the application of a gender lens to how we provide and use funding to close this gap.

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.

We had a conversation with Ingrid Leong, CIO for the Houssian Foundation, asking her to look back on her experience aligning the Foundation’s investment strategy with gender lens investing and creating a fully mission-aligned investment portfolio. She offered her honest reflections and advice for those starting out on this journey.

We talk about scarcity mentality versus the regenerative economy with Rachel J. Robasciotti, Founder & CEO of Adasina Social Capital, and why investing in alignment with social justice movements just makes financial sense.

First-time women-led funds present an untapped source of alpha and impact. GenderSmart’s First Time Women Led and Diverse Funds Initiative offers an overview of why and how you should be investing in these funds as an opportunity to contribute to the promotion of gender equality on a deeper and wider scale.

GenderSmart and VC Include announce the first-ever global showcase with the goal of connecting gender-smart investors and fund managers with a gender lens.

EIB’s Moa Westman outlines four key gender-responsive climate actions, which can strengthen climate and environmental outcomes and, often, are also a business and market opportunity. They help expand the customer base, enhance customer satisfaction, improve financial and business performance, and attract more investments from impact investors.

Strategically deploying more capital to gender-smart vehicles and investments serving both women and men entrepreneurs requires action from all actors in the ecosystem. Here are some key pathways to action, identified during a recent GenderSmart and We-Fi Programme technical workshop on increasing investments in women entrepreneurs through funds and structured vehicles.

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.

Prejudice benefits no one. But just how harmful is it to societies worldwide? And what are the economic arguments for overcoming it? Paul Donovan, Chief Economist at UBS – and author of "Profit and Prejudice: The Luddites of the Fourth Industrial Revolution" – explains the facts and fictions of discrimination.

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.

Over the past six months, GenderSmart has taken to heart our commitment to racial equity and diversity, examining both our own practices and our potential to influence others. Here’s a short progress report, and some thoughts about what comes next.

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.