Menu
Session Objectives:
As the W+ Standard increasingly proves to be a solution to gender-responsive climate finance, various partners are emerging to collaborate with WOCAN and utilize the W+ Standard.
In this session, panelists representing these organizations within the W+ Standard ecosystem:
Panelists will speak to how and why they employ the W+ Standard and how they see it improving climate outcomes.
The session also features practical application of the W+ Standard in projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America and its value as perceived by various stakeholders in the ecosystem.
About WOCAN and the W+ Standard
WOCAN created the W+ Standard in 2014 as a result-based financing and market-based framework to incentivize project developers to amplify support for gender /women’s empowerment and create new channels of revenue for grassroots women’s organizations. This innovation was inspired by the approach of carbon markets to monetize environmental impacts and channel capital to fund projects and benefit communities.
The W+ Standard is a framework for designing as well as monitoring results within projects and generates W+ credits—quantified and verified units of improvement in women’s conditions from a baseline in six domains. It has been applied to dozens of climate projects and can be combined with carbon credits as a co-benefit. A requirement of the W+ Standard is that at least 20 percent of the proceeds from the sale of these credits must be shared with women’s groups engaged in the project.
Moderator: Jeannette Gurung, Founder and Executive Director of Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (WOCAN)
Panelists:
Speakers Bios:
Edit Kiss is Co-founder & Chief Commercial Officer for Integrity Global Partners, a company enabling investors to unlock fair and equitable capital at scale through the development of carbon and other environmental assets. Edit currently leads all commercial origination and evaluation of projects, including all due diligence, risk assessment, and financial structuring on projects.
Edit brings 17+ years of experience in the entire value chain of carbon markets – project development and finance, origination, investment deal structuring and execution, and sales and trading. She has experience working in financial institutions, carbon funds, and renewable energy companies in London, Paris, Lugano, Rotterdam, and Budapest.
Edit is currently a Non-Executive Board Director of the UK’s first rewilding business, the Real Wild Estates Company; co-chair of IETA’s Natural Climate Solutions working group; Steering Committee Member and Co-Chair of the Biodiversity Credits Working Group of the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation (CPIC). Previous roles included: Chief Investment Officer at Revalue Nature, Investment and Development Director at Mirova Natural Capital, Structured Origination Manager, REDD+ specialist at Eneco Energy Trade, Carbon Originator at Constellation Energy.
Destenie Nock is the Chief Sustainability Officer of DevvStream, a carbon streaming company. She is also an Assistant Professor of Engineering and Public Policy and Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a leader in energy justice, environmental justice, sustainable energy transitions, and the energy-poverty-climate change nexus. She has pioneered new measures of energy poverty to help utility companies identify vulnerable populations and energy deficits. From this work she has spun out a company, and is the Chief Executive Officer of Peoples Energy Analytics, a data driven company which uses energy analytics to identify poverty in vulnerable households.
Cécile Bibiane Ndjebet is President and Founder of the African Women’s Network for Community Management of Forests (REFACOF) and the Coordinator of Cameroon Ecology. Cécile Bibiane Ndjebet is an agronomist and social forester from rural Cameroon who specializes in women’s leadership. Her extensive experience includes work that addresses gender’s intersection with land tenure, climate change, and reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+). She was recently named a Champion of the Earth for Inspiration and Action by the UNEP following three decades of advocacy for women’s land rights in Africa. Cameroon Ecology, an organization she co-founded in 2001, has restored over 600 hectares of degraded land and mangrove forest. In 2009, she founded the African Women’s Network for Community Management of Forests (REFACOF), which encourages the representation of women’s interests in environmental policies across 20 African countries. Cécile was elected Climate Change Champion of the Central African Commission on Forests in 2012 and serves as a member of the advisory board of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. She has won several awards, including the Gulbenkian Prize of Humanity Winner, 2023, UN Champion of The Earth, Category Inspiration and Action, 2022, Wangari Maathai Forests Champion, 2022, and COMIFAC Climate Change Champion, 2012.
Jeannette Gurung has over 25 years of experience designing and delivering capacity-strengthening programs to integrate gender and women’s empowerment into climate, agriculture and environment-related organizations and programs in over 25 countries and has been an innovator at the nexus of gender equality and climate-related sectors, working with both public and private organizations and projects. She is founder and Executive Director of WOCAN, a global network with over 1450 members in 1148 countries, to support capacity building for women’s leadership and empowerment and gender integration. She is a thought-leader in innovative financing for climate, gender and impact investing and creator of the W+ Standard to measure, quantify and monetize impacts of projects and supply chains on women’s empowerment, through the use of a results-based financing approach designed to provide incentives to projects and companies and new revenue streams to community-level women’s groups and enterprises. Jeannette is co-founder of the Women and Climate Impact Fund (https://www.wcifund.org)- a unique blended finance social investment fund to provide capital to projects that impact women’s empowerment and gender equality while reducing the effects of climate change, while using the W+ Standard to assure quality impacts. From her home base in Hawai’i, she is developing a Climate-resilient & Agricultural Innovation Hub for Women Farmers in Hawai’i County, to pilot innovations and practices to achieve climate and economic resilience through support to women farmers.
Jeannette has knowledge and experience with voluntary carbon markets and is currently a member of the Natural Climate Solutions Alliance, Climate Impact X International Advisory Council, the Sustainable Development Advisory Group of Verra. She is also a member of the Women in Carbon Network, and the Gender and Environment Data Alliance Technical Guidance and Learning Working Group.
Jeannette has a MSc in forestry from the University of Washington, and a PhD in Gender and Development from the University of East Anglia. She has expertise in certification and standards, monitoring and evaluation, training, research, gender and organizational analysis, policy advocacy and network building. She has lived in several countries of South and SE Asia.