By Jeannette Gurung & Kaylene Alvarez
Devising a solution to funding women’s organizations working to reduce climate change is not a simple one. WOCAN has been working at the nexus of gender and climate since its founding in 2004. We know it’s complicated and nuanced. We also recognize that the solutions can’t be over-complicated. It needs to work in a variety of countries, contexts and for the myriad of strategies needed to support mitigation and adaptation, with a sense of urgency.
One of the first challenges WOCAN is tackling is the biggest one: funding for women’s organizations.
We framed the question we are asking as this:
How do we fund women’s groups (through the generation of W+ credits) while satisfying the needs that investors have, including some financial return and having a clear “fiduciary” responsible for protecting their investment through management of the organization?
The options that we have explored are agnostic in terms of investor type. We’ve looked at pure private, profit maximizing, investors and structures. We’ve looked at pure grant capital. We’ve looked at impact investing, concessionary finance and blended capital. The key takeaways so far are three-fold:
- Similar to the role Project Developers play in financing renewable energy projects, there needs to be an investment mechanism that pays for the up-front cost, with some sort of “guarantee” or high probability that those credits will be available to fund the financial return for those who invest in the up-front costs
- There needs to be a consistent and predictable flow of revenue to ensure that women’s organizations (like cooperatives or other types of formally organized entities) and other locally-centric organizations/firms receive income from the sale of W+ credits. The income they receive from the sale of W+ credits will be compensation for the important role that they play in increasing and sustaining activities for women’s empowerment and in locally sustainable solutions to support the planet.
- The design and development of projects to ensure the creation of sale-able W+ credits requires upfront capital as well as the ability to indicatively understand which projects can generate credits, at what order of magnitude, and a market-based sales price for the credits
These “big picture” takeaways aren’t necessarily earth-shattering. But they are the keys to a solution. We’ll spend the next few blogs doing a deeper dive into more specifics, including what may work, what likely won’t work, and the investor perceptions that we need to overcome. We do hope you’ll join us, and welcome other comments, ideas or suggestions. We’ll also be putting 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 Linked In (WOCAN and the W+ Standard).
Jeannette Gurung Kaylene Alvarez
Executive Director CEO of Athena Global and WOCAN Board member