Field updates: Tools to Enhance Climate and Gender Investing
Across climate mitigation, adaptation, resilience, and nature-based solutions, investors are increasingly deploying gender-smart strategies that are delivering stronger climate outcomes, unlocking new sources of growth, and enhancing long-term value creation. That’s been our mission at Heading for Change - making catalytic investments and grants that accelerate proven solutions to the climate crisis and advance gender equity.
Over the last two years, we have been focused on building our investment portfolio of 18 climate and gender funds to help demonstrate what climate and gender investing looks like in practice, advancing a set of catalytic field-building grants, and being immersed in field building activities, such as publishing an open-source Investment Toolkit.
Field building is core to our DNA. From the very beginning, our goal has been not only to put our capital to work, but also to catalyse other allocators and stakeholders - highlighting emerging opportunities, identifying gaps, and sharing our insights and learnings. This lighthouse effect helps to signal direction, surface examples of good practice, and support others to move faster and with more confidence.
Image: #WOCinTech via Unsplash
Ramping up Field Building in 2026
One of our strategic pillars is building the field of climate and gender finance by amplifying learnings and insights to strengthen the evidence base and grow the field’s capacity to move more capital into integrated climate and gender strategies. We create spaces for peer learning, collaboration and connection, across our donors, portfolio partners, co-investors, field builders, and thought leaders. These enable shared learning, cross-pollination of ideas and co-diligence and co-investment, while building on-ramps for others to follow, adapt and build on - offering flexible entry points into climate and gender investing.
Roundtables
A key activity this year has been hosting a series of virtual roundtables, convening investors, fund managers, advisors, and ecosystem leaders who are advancing climate and gender investing. These gatherings created a trusted space to collaborate, surface practical investment strategies, and share lessons on risk, return, and impact across asset classes and geographies. They also strengthened alignment among capital providers, unlocking new partnerships and shaping more ambitious, durable commitments to gender-responsive climate finance, while building shared language and intent.
In addition, Heading for Change hosted and joined in-person gatherings at Skoll World Forum and London Climate Action Week - offering a pulse check and a broader view of where the climate and gender finance field is heading.
What we’re seeing: key takeaways from the field
Progress continues as narrative shifts to value creation, but siloes remain
Overall, climate and gender investing has seen steady progress, driven by strong interest and active allocation - particularly from DFIs and impact investors. Moreover, there has been a noticeable shift in framing, with greater emphasis on value creation and more active engagement across the full investment lifecycle, which is helping to strengthen the evidence base linking gender, resilience and performance. At the same time, while there is a gradual move towards more integrated approaches, silos persist and generally it has been more prevalent to integrate gender into climate strategies.
A growing playbook for what good looks like, with opportunities to deepen capacity and best practices
Stronger case studies, improved tools, and more locally grounded models for deploying capital abound. This growing body of evidence on what good looks like, including examples across sectors, more nuanced case studies, and sector-specific tools are playing a key role in expanding collective capacity. Additionally, there needs to be increasing focus and application of a gender lens at portfolio level, while balancing team capacity and training, deal-level flexibility and variation.
Smart business, better returns and long-term value
There is a growing focus on enhancing value creation and using incentives and impact-linked finance to improve impact, gender and climate outcomes. In partnership with LPs and in many cases, supported by technical assistance funding, fund managers are engaging with their portfolio companies on gender, and capturing women’s positive experiences on the ground, strengthening the evidence base and case for gender.
Old challenges, new strains
This progress sits alongside growing headwinds. Political and market pressures, including backlash against DEI in some contexts and wider uncertainty, are influencing sentiment and, in some cases, how openly gender integration is positioned. The fundraising and exit environment remains test, with flexibility and resilience being key.
Against this backdrop, there has been growing consensus on what the field can do next, which includes advancing:
More intentional, strategic and fit-for-purpose capital design and allocation, grounded in effectiveness and efficiency
Client and context-led approaches grounded in lived experience
Stride the specificity and complexity line without losing nuance: not all deals or themes can be gender transformative
Activating sustained change by leveraging governance structures, specific thematic and gender targets as well as incentives
Tap into the growing pool of values-aligned allocators, including women and next-generation wealth holders
Leverage the broader framing around resilience and security to ensure climate and gender remains integral to future-proofed investing strategies and portfolios
With Summer in full swing (in the Northern Hemisphere), we are excited to share a series of field-level resources that have emerged from these virtual and in-person gatherings, that we hope will be useful for the broad set of investors, intermediaries and other partners in the field as they sharpen and advance their climate and gender investing strategies.
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To quench the consistent ask from stakeholders for practical resource outlining what climate and gender investing is, why it matters now, how it applies across mitigation, adaptation and resilience, and what questions investors can use to guide decision-making, we have built out a presentation resource. This deck is intended as a flexible resource for anyone preparing presentations, internal discussions or stakeholder engagement.
If you reuse or adapt any part of it, please include a reference to Heading for Change. -
This resource brings together key climate and gender investing frameworks and toolkits, illustrating some of the most widely used resources and making what's out there more easily accessible. Designed to support practitioners working directly in this space, these are meant to be a starting point for actors to build upon and add new resources as they emerge.
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As progress in data collection continues to be made, there continues to be room to go deeper in measuring real outcomes, not just outputs, and to advance data quality and consistency. Drawing from a survey that stakeholders contributed to as well as research and analysis, we have collated a large set of metrics and guidance, drawn from what investors are already measuring and where standards are beginning to converge. This includes both stand-alone climate and gender metrics and sector-specific approaches to climate and gender integration.
Investment Toolkit & Guide
And as a bonus, here is a reminder of Heading for Change’s Investment Toolkit and Guide, which brings together learnings from across our work, including: strategy design, deal sourcing, diligence and portfolio construction, and translates it into practical resources that others can adapt. It includes:
Guidance on using the Investment Scorecard, Portfolio Construction Tool, Climate & Gender DDQ, and Pipeline platform
Portfolio examples and a detailed diligence case study
Step-by-step processes from strategy design through to investment decision-making
Together, these tools are designed to make climate and gender investing more accessible, more consistent, and more actionable.
Where the field goes from here
Hosting the roundtables and working on field-level outputs has been helpful at better aligning practices and tools, advancing shared language and shared infrastructure, strengthening relationships, identifying priority pathways and leverage points, and driving concrete commitments and actions for unlocking more and better gender-smart climate finance. We are grateful for the support of each actor, whether a fund manager, investor, advisory firm, intermediary, academic or other hat-wearer! It is incredible to be in partnership with such an incredible group of allies, committed towards moving the field forward.
We would like to thank these organisations for their active participation: Dalberg, 2XG, William Davidson, Root Capital, EIB, Co Sustain Consulting, Courageous Capital, Canopy Lab, Value for Women, FSD Africa, 22 Fund, Blue Haven Initiative, FMO, Acumen, Alpha Mundi, Roots of Impact, The Rallying Cry, Tiime, Catalyst Fund, MCE Social Capital, Venture Souq, Altree Capital, Regenera Ventures, EG Capital, AC Ventures, Supply Change Fund, Circulate Capital, Eco Enterprises Fund, Kore Global, Global Partnerships.
In particular we want to thank Milena (from Sagana), Danielle Burt and Rebecca Calder for leaning in and providing strategic and timely input and feedback into these outputs.
Beyond this work: Outputs to Consider for the Future
As we look ahead, during our conversations and brainstorming, investors and practitioners put forward ideas for collective outputs that could be built out. These include:
An anonymised climate and gender investing deal database (sorted by sector, country, instrument type, etc), showing questions asked, how impact was tracked, deal structures used
A sub-database of blended finance deals - key terms, actors, metrics
Greater connectivity across ongoing research to ensure more robust, connected projects emerge.
Collation of financial outcomes, including exit strategies and key return metrics to help showcase successful financial results
Continue having an active, welcoming space for the field to convene, and share learnings and insights