Blog #1: Catalytic Investment for Gender and Climate

For the last nine months, WOCAN and its Taskforce 4 on Catalyzing Gender and Climate Finance (https://www.wocan.org/project/supporting-climate-adaptation-with-womens-organizations/) has been diving deep into financing women and climate.  Our goal has been to better understand key inflections points, including:

• The “state of the field” of investing in gender and climate
• Innovations, pilots, successes and pivots in funding gender and climate
• Key bottlenecks to moving capital, from the supply and demand sides
• Allocating capital to organizations, and not businesses, especially for climate adaptation
• How to use the WOCAN-developed, W+ standard as a way to generate income for the women’s organizations on the front lines of climate change
• What would be needed to deploy capital to those at the front lines of gender and climate, to get funding quickly to scale, to support the most immediate needs to combat climate change at the root cause
• The “supply side” dynamics of women’s organizations working in climate that could use the W+ standard to generate revenue to support investment
• Market of potential buyers of W+ credits, with or without an accompanying carbon credit

What we’ve found has been humbling, inspiring, exasperating and disappointing—sometimes all at the same time. We’d like to share our learnings, impressions and findings publicly.  And to also invite others into this work.  We hope this is useful to others on their journey to supporting the efforts of gender and climate and will start meaningful conversations and collaborations. 

Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be sharing through 3 different strategies:

• Blogs—we’ll be publishing blogs monthly about key findings, interesting projects, and pivotal data points
• Talking points on how to talk about gender and climate
• Curated, small group meetings around other large convenings (including at SOCAP (Social Capital Markets), NY Climate Week, COP28, etc.)

We’ll also be putting in links to these in our monthly newsletter.  If you want to receive these communications, you can sign up for our newsletter here: https://www.wocan.org/sign-up/ (also  https://www.wplus.org/receive-our-updates/)or follow us on LinkedIn (WOCAN and the W+ Standard).

The first challenge that we tackled was to identify who is providing funding at the intersection of gender and climate.  The list of organizations is not insubstantial and can be found at the end of this blog.

We acknowledge that many of the development donors also claim to support both gender and climate as a cross-cutting issue. These include the Africa Development Bank (AfDB), Asia Development Bank (ADB), British International Investment (BII), European Bank for Reconstruction & Development (EBRD), European Investment Bank (EIB), FinDev Canada, FMO, GIZ, Global Affairs Canada (GAC), InterAmerican Development Bank (IADB), International Finance Corporation (IFC), KfW, SvedFund, Nor Fund, SIDA, Proparco, US Development Finance Corporation (USDFC), USAID, World Bank and others.

However, we are trying to keep our list to specific programs or initiatives that are intended to reach specific, verifiable outcomes. Therefore, we have listed discrete programs and funds supported by DFI/MDB donors in our list, but not the general institutions.

This list encompasses those organizations that claim to be providing financial support for gender AND climate, in parallel, in any way.  This can include grants, investments (debt or equity), individual programs or projects, design stage funding for pilots or pre-pilot, and blended finance structures.  We are using only publicly available information and are unable to vet or verify public claims made by these organizations.  If you have other information on these organizations, are from one of these organizations and would like to provide more background, or have others to add to the list, please contact us at: Jeannette at jeannettegurung@wocan.org or Kaylene at kalvarez@athenaga.com.  Our goal is to keep this list updated on our website for others to use, as well.  At some point, we also hope to do interviews or webinars with the people doing the work to share.

Stay tuned for more insights in our monthly blog series!

Jeannette and Kaylene

List of Gender and Climate Funders: