Monthly Archives: October 2022

GenderSmart Investing Summit: Traction to Transformation

Suzanne Biegel Co-founder, GenderSmart with Kshama Fernandes Chairperson, Northern Arc Investments

The 2022 GenderSmart Investing Summit took place in London on Oct 18-19. Although I could not attend physically, I could feel the enthusiasm, power, and passion through reading and watching the takeaways, highlights, and videos. This powerful movement to mainstream and integrate gender across the whole capital spectrum and all value chains is accelerating.

GenderSmart’s merger with 2XCollaborative into 2XGlobal (as of Jan 2023) was announced at the Summit. 2XGlobal‘s mission is “to equip and engage the full spectrum of investors, intermediaries, and innovators capable of transforming systems of finance through the gender-smart deployment of capital across asset classes and markets.”

Also during the Summit, the GenderSmart State of the Field 2022 the most extensive and qualitative survey capturing the broadest and most in-depth spectrum of insight and experience across the gender-smart investing field to date was released.

Kudos to the GenderSmart community and especially to Suzanne Biegel for her leadership and contagious passion for advancing this field forward.

Global impact investment market exceeds $1tn

The global impact investment market exceeded $1tn according to the latest study of Global Impact Investment Network (GIIN). Amit Bouri, CEO of GIIN announced this figure and unveiled the latest report Sizing the Impact Investment Market 2022 at GIIN Investor Forum in Hague (Oct 12-13).

“In recent times, the climate crisis, the drive for transparency around impact performance reporting, and global sustainability reporting standards have brought renewed attention towards the importance of implementing impact investing strategies throughout the investment process. The Core Characteristics of Impact Investing require a clearly stated impact intention, as well as measurement and management of impact performance throughout the investment cycle, to ensure that investments achieve positive impact results relative to the previously defined impact intentions” (from this report).

Other significant impact investment topics on the rise: Gender lens investment, Climate justice finance, and financial inclusion for refugees.