Just Good Investing: Calvert Impact's Gender Lens Investing Journey

by Jennifer Pryce, President & CEO of Calvert Impact

The upcoming 2023 Women’s History Month theme is “Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories.” This theme recognizes “women, past and present, who have been active in all forms of media.” It is not often that women in finance are invited to tell their stories, here is mine, the story of Calvert Impact’s journey into gender lens investing.

Calvert Impact has invested in women since our founding nearly 30 years ago. As an investment firm dedicated to investing in solutions that people and planet need, we helped grow the microfinance and community development financial industries, both of which are important sources of capital for female entrepreneurs. Ten years ago, we began experimenting with a more formal approach to investing in women. On International Women’s Day in 2012, Calvert Impact launched our first strategic initiative focused on empowering women, the Women Investing in Women Initiative (WIN-WIN). The goal of this initiative was to move from the dialogue of ‘why’ investing in women was important to actually putting capital to work. We sourced potential deals for gender impact and inclusiveness and created specific metrics to track our progress. We built a diverse global portfolio, from affordable housing in Texas to off-grid solar solutions in Tanzania. While the successes of WIN-WIN were numerous – nearly 900 investors channeled capital into projects that benefited over 20 thousand women and their families – some of the most valuable outcomes for us were the lessons learned from this endeavor.

As we analyzed the data from this diverse, global portfolio, it became clear that to understand our impact over time, we needed to take a sector and region-focused approach.

Read Jenn's very interesting article here - https://greenmoney.com/just-good-investing-our-gender-lens-investing-journey

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