WOCAN has received a grant for Assessing the Landscape: Climate Adaptation, Women’s Organizations & Enterprises from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) to design an innovative model in gender-responsive climate adaptation and resilience.
The intended outcome of this planning grant is the development of a Strategy Implementation Framework to provide a clear path for rural women’s organizations and enterprises to meet their needs for climate adaptation. Activities funded by this planning grant will produce the ‘proof of concept’ for the model to use a result-based financing and market-based approach using the W+ Standard to provide rural women’s organizations and enterprises with revenue and technical assistance to support climate adaptation initiatives.
The grant will provide WOCAN with 18 months of support for the planning and readiness assessment of long-term opportunity through the development of a model that can be scaled, and culminate in a detailed program model to be presented to the BMGF as well as other funders, to Scale Impact for Gender Equality and Climate Outcomes. This will provide resources to women’s organizations and enterprises, Support- Institutions (that provide technical assistance), and funding intermediaries to scale up gender-responsive climate mitigation and adaptation actions to achieve climate adaptation and women’s empowerment outcomes simultaneously within the most climate-vulnerable communities.
WOCAN’s ultimate goal is to enable rural women’s organizations to become technically and financially self-sufficient to address climate adaptation for themselves, their families and their communities. We believe that we can harness the decades of experience of WOCAN and its partners at the nexus of gender and climate, to leverage climate finance and use the W+ Standard as means to this end. The W+ Standard provides the model to scale this approach by providing an innovative mechanism to use climate mitigation financing for climate adaptation purposes, through its requirement of grant provisions to women’s groups at the local level.
The problem statement for this grant is that insufficient information is currently known about the landscape of potential women’s organizations and enterprises, Support Institutions, and funders that could engage in the scaling of gender and climate impacts. This includes a need for more information about the buyers of W+ credits and public and private investors that are seeking opportunities to invest in gender and climate projects.
Activities of this 18-month planning grant include:
- Research to identify and understand the needs of rural women’s organizations and enterprises working on climate mitigation and/or adaptation and women’s empowerment, from their perspectives, in 2 regions of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia
- Mapping the Support Institutions and Climate Project Developers in the same 2 regions
- Application of the W+ Standard to 2 projects
- Training for an enlarged and geographically diversified pool of W+ experts and verifiers
- W+ market research and development for sales of W+ credits
- Assessment of the suitability of the W+ Standard benefit sharing mechanism and process to meet needs of rural women’s organizations for climate adaptation
- Mapping the financial intermediaries, funders and investors supporting gender and climate
Four Taskforce groups have been established for these activities, to tap into the expertise and experience of a diverse group of experts in Women’s Groups/Enterprises, Capacity Development for the W+ Standard, W+ Market Development and Financial Frameworks. WOCAN is honored to have the following distinguished individuals as members of the Taskforces, as seen by their bios below:
Program Taskforce
Taskforce 1: Mapping Womens’ Organizations
Larissa Dominguez, Mexico
Program Manager
Annabell Waititu, Kenya
Dibya Devi Gurung, Nepal
Taskforce 2: Capacity Building
Barun Gurung
Liz Allen
Lisa McMullan
Lisa is the Director for Development at The Women’s Organisation and Enterprise Evolution Principal Consultant in Liverpool, U.K. Lisa seeks to build entrepreneurial capacity by providing advice, training, project development and evaluation support for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial organizations and those working to support them. Lisa’s recent portfolio of work focuses on enterprise education and is the culmination of over twenty years’ experience working directly with would-be entrepreneurs, small business owners, social enterprise leaders and public institutions that inform the support and activities she now designs for entrepreneurs and their educators. Lisa has worked across the UK and internationally and has particular experience in the fields of: Women’s Enterprise: Adviser and promoter of women’s entrepreneurship and Evaluation: Applying social accounting and audit principles to design and undertake a holistic approach to evaluation activities to include social, economic and environmental impact. Lisa has verified several W+ certifications and co-designed a training for W+ verifiers from several countries that started in 2020. Lisa resides in Liverpool, U.K.
Smita Biswas
Smita Biswas is an economist, chartered accountant and sustainable development specialist with over 25 years of international development experience. She is a self-employed consultant specialising in programme design, gender and social inclusion, results monitoring and VfM analysis, particularly in the infrastructure (including energy) and manufacturing sectors. She is currently the Results Monitoring & Gender & Inclusion MEL Lead for the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, IKEA Foundation and Bezos Earth Fund to accelerate and scale an equitable energy transition in developing countries. There Smita is responsible for the development of the results monitoring and measurement system and ensuring that Gender and Inclusion perspectives are considered in all aspects of the MEL system design and implementation. Additionally, Smita is a strategic advisor to the Self Employed Women’s Association, India; Monitoring, Results, Evaluation & Learning Advisor, where she advises SEWA’s MOVE (Mahila Owned Viable Enterprises) program. she had previously supported their microfinance activities for 5 years. She is also the Gender & Social Inclusion Lead for the ASEAN Low Carbon Energy Programme- a £15m technical assistance programme of the UK’s Prosperity Fund. The programme aims to help ASEAN harness the benefits from the deployment of low carbon energy by leveraging the regions/UK and other international countries’ extensive and proven expertise in green finance and energy efficiency. Smita headed the results monitoring and development impact team of the Private Infrastructure Development Group – a global infrastructure-focused poverty reduction programme aimed at encouraging private sector led infrastructure investment in the poorest developing countries. Prior to this, she was a Technical Director – Social Development at IMC Worldwide from 2003-2008 where she undertook social impact assessments and designed gender mainstreaming/livelihoods activities, especially for the infrastructure sector in selected countries of Asia and Africa. Smita holds a Bachelors in Economics and a Masters (with Distinction) in Social Policy & Planning for Developing Countries, both from the London School of Economics. She is a first time qualified Chartered Accountant, having trained with Ernst and Young, London between 1993-1996. Smita resides in London.
Taskforce 3: W+ Market Development
Tanushree Bagh Mukherjee
Chief Development Officer, Green Star
Genevieve Soh
Head of Platforms and Ecosystems, Climate Impact X
Sue Phillips
Justin White
Mil Niepold
Mil Niepold is the Founder and President of The Mara Partners (TMP), a global consulting, research and training organization that works at the intersection of gender, equity and the environment to solve complex intersectional issues both in the US and globally. Mil works with Fortune 500 companies (including Amazon, Nestle and Mondelez, among others), governments, the United Nations and civil society organizations to structure equitable long-term solutions that balance the needs of all stakeholders. Mil is currently leading TMP’s research and thought leadership on the critical and oft ignored role that applying a gender lens to climate initiatives plays in accelerating impact from the grassroots through to the top levels of government. Mil pioneered the Integrated Gender and Climate Framework (IGCF) currently being used by a group of Fortune 500 companies. She has trained women climate leaders on negotiation, with organizations such as the Asian Development Bank, the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance, as well as on strategies to ensure that women routinely influence decision-making processes related to land use, natural resource conservation, human rights and biodiversity. Previously, Mil was the Director of Policy at Verité – _a leading human rights organization — for 14 years, where she led several initiatives on women in the workplace and other multi-stakeholder initiatives for clients that included HP, Adidas, Reebok and Levi Strauss, among others. Mil is a gender and climate advisor to the Kite Climate School, the Daring Circle on Climate at the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society, Co-President of the International Cocoa Initiative, the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship and was founding Co-Chair of Amnesty International USA’s first business and human rights group. Mil is also a frequent public speaker including for the World Bank, IFC, the Climate Investment Fund, and various universities. Mil lives in Washington, D.C.
Rachel Vestergaard
Rachel is the CEO and Founder of Empower Co., a company that is building the first global voluntary market for women’s empowerment units. Previously, Rachel was the Director of Business Development at Wildlife Works Carbon, the company that developed the world’s first validated and verified REDD+ project in 2011 and sold the first REDD+ carbon offsets to corporate buyers such as Coca-Cola, UPS, Microsoft, Hershey’s and more. She later joined Xpansiv as SVP of the Americas driving and overseeing the company’s expansion in the US voluntary carbon market. Since 2015 Rachel has been on the advisory council for the W+ Standard which compelled her to launch Empower Co. to create demand for W+ units to scale women’s empowerment and provide net positive contributions to all Sustainable Development Goals. In addition, Rachel volunteers her time as the Head of Market Mechanism Development for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative. Rachel resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Heidi Hafes
Market Development Manager and Gender Lead Shell Foundation
Heidi Hafes leads Shell Foundation’s Gender-inclusion program. Heidi developed the Foundation’s gender-inclusion strategy, which included being pioneers in designing and funding business-first gender technical assistance for impact enterprises in the energy sector. Building on this work she is working with others to develop innovative finance mechanisms that incentivise mainstream gender inclusion into business models to deliver better outcomes for women. She resides in London.