Gender lens investing emphasizes the importance of gender equality for the energy transition and aims to channel investment capital toward companies and initiatives that contribute to a more prosperous, equitable, and inclusive society. It involves analyzing and evaluating companies and projects based on their commitment to promoting gender equality, women's rights, and opportunities for women in business and society. With a gender lens investment approach, investors support companies and projects that prioritize gender diversity in their leadership and workforce, offer fair and equal pay, provide opportunities for women to advance and succeed, and create products and services that benefit women and girls. This approach supports an inclusive energy transition that creates more transparent, inclusive, and equitable financial systems, which in turn supports economic opportunity and sustainable livelihoods for more people.

Scaling Up Renewable Energy 

Through the Scaling Up Renewable Energy (SURE) program, USAID supports financial institutions and investors to make credit and capital of different values, types, and sources more available and accessible to women. SURE also helps them strengthen gender equality practices in human resources and business processes.  

SURE is helping to change how public and private institutions invest in an equitable clean energy future. The program works with development finance institutions, private investors, funds, venture capital investors, private equity investors, and other financial intermediaries that offer financing for renewable energy and energy efficiency, helping them to incorporate a gender and inclusion approach into the entire investment process. This includes due diligence for potential investment portfolios, risk analysis, portfolio performance evaluation, and capital allocation. 

SURE engages financial actors on the economic and social benefits of applying a gender lens to their energy investment portfolios. We partner with firms to identify and invest in companies and projects that increase the number and bottom lines of women-owned enterprises, increase gender diversity in financial institutions’ investment committees, and increase gender diversity in the workforce and contractors who participate in infrastructure projects. Our experts conduct gender assessments on the investment life cycle of energy projects and identify entry points for gender lens investing. We help partners develop a gender lens integration strategy and customize tools and materials to successfully implement it in one or more funding rounds with a subset of applicants. We assist partners to measure and demonstrate gender impacts; we also monitor and evaluate what works to calibrate tools and materials that adapt to lessons learned.  

SURE supports Latin American private equity investor Exagon Impact Capital, African climate-focused impact investment fund  Acre Impact Capital, and the Colombian Fund for Non-Conventional Energy and Energy Efficiency (FENOGE)  to better integrate gender considerations at the organizational and investment levels that drive financial returns, result in reduced income equality, and produce disproportionately high social and economic benefits.  

Impact

Reforming how financial institutions provide credit and capital increases access to finance for women-owned and women-led companies. As a result of SURE technical assistance, investment funds have secured over $120 million to be invested using a gender lens. As part of this work, SURE has trained 13 fund managers and investment leaders in gender lens investing and survivor-centered approaches to address gender-based violence and harassment throughout the investment cycle. Strategically integrating inclusive and gender lens approaches to the full investment cycle, fund allocations, and investors’ business operations and processes increases productivity and profitability and improves economic stability and resilience.