Ignites are talks by inspirational leaders in gender finance and adjacent fields, designed to kickstart action and new ideas. Our second Ignite speaker is Marla Blow, President and COO of the Skoll Foundation, on transforming systems of finance.

Across our community, there is a commonly held belief that part of what is holding back the systems change we seek is a question of power, privilege and bias. Who has the power, who doesn't? As changemakers, what can we do personally, organisationally, for the field? This session will explore these questions within an investment context and take steps to address the inequities within our own processes.

Shifting investment strategies requires the ability to influence others. While effective messaging and narrative building is a critical part of this process, there are other ethical influence strategies and tactics. In this interactive and fun session delegates will learn the art and science of influencing: expect role playing, a review of brain science and planning your next ‘influential’ conversation in the context of investment decision-making and strategy building.

This workshop is designed to help every investor, investment influencer and intermediary ensure that gender and equity are integrated across strategies, themes, sectors and approaches. Delegates will take part in an interactive exercise that looks ahead to a truly equitable future in 2030, and co-create key actions, milestones, insights and blueprints for scaling gender finance.

One of the biggest barriers to shifting investment strategy is effective stakeholder engagement. In this workshop focused on narrative strategy, peer groups of actors from family offices to DFIs will exchange ideas, feedback and what’s worked (or hasn’t worked) for them as they construct a set of contextually-relevant, persuasive narratives for investing with a gender lens.

Consensus abounds that there has been immense traction in terms of data and research to make equitable gender-smart investment decisions. However, it is also acknowledged that progress has tended to come from a narrow set of perspectives. Whether research is focused on Global North expertise and firms, and lacking local geographic nuance, or carried out by those with financial but not gender expertise, the investment process is lacking valuable analysis and insights. What might it mean to fully integrate the voices of communities, gender experts, civil society organisations and public sector actors for gender equality outcomes? What’s needed is a leap forward in gender analysis, to refine what good and better looks like.

This working session will explore the trends and drivers influencing gender, climate and the global investment context over the next 20 years. This session builds off the ongoing foresight work from the climate and gender investment working group.

Based on a series of potential future scenarios, delegates will explore what implications and investable opportunities might emerge within these futures, how their current investment strategies would fair in these different realities, and what we can individually and collectively do today prepare for these possible outcomes.

This 45-minute plenary discussion will zone in on the spectrum of collective action and systems-level approaches needed to optimise gender-smart capital deployment. Plenary moderator Laurie Spengler, CEO, Courageous Capital Advisors, will lead three panelists representing the voices of institutional capital and leadership in discussion, to untangle challenges and unearth tangible next steps.

GenderSmart Co-Founder Suzanne Biegel interviews Northern Arc's Dr Kshama Fernandes about the journey of traction to transformation: what it looks like in practice, challenges along the risk and return spectrum, and what it means to scale up innovative approaches in the gender finance field for deeper, sustained impact.

According to the Knight Foundation, 98.7% of assets under management in the US are managed by white men. The same trends reverberate globally, where women and diverse fund managers remain under-resourced and underserved. In an innovative workshop format that encourages deep listening, LPs and GPs will identify misperceptions on both sides and identify opportunities to cultivate the next tier of underrepresented fund managers.

There has been a sustained increase in gender finance, with a proliferation of case studies, strategies, policies, tools, and frameworks. Yet progress is not uniform. In this session, delegates will reassess their understanding of the problems that gender-smart capital is aiming to solve, and start to co-create impactful and fit-for-purpose finance for female and diverse founders and fund managers.

This session is focused on private markets across equity, debt, blended finance and other innovative mechanisms. It has a thematic/sectoral lens across agriculture, care economy, energy and infrastructure, water and sanitation, and financial inclusion.

This working session will explore the trends and drivers influencing gender, climate and the global investment context over the next 20 years. This session builds off the ongoing foresight work from the climate and gender investment working group.

Based on a series of potential future scenarios, delegates will explore what implications and investable opportunities might emerge within these futures, how their current investment strategies would fair in these different realities, and what we can individually and collectively do today prepare for these possible outcomes.

This workshop builds off the just-released State of the Field report and the 2018 gender finance ecosystem map to help participants situate themselves within the ecosystem and understand the leverage points for scaling gender-smart capital. In doing so, delegates will develop a new understanding of the bigger system they are working to shift and identify potential new ways and actions sets to do so.

Gender and a wider equity and diversity approach is relevant regardless of where you sit on the capital continuum and across all asset classes. Join this workshop to level up how to integrate investing with a gender lens throughout the investment process equitably and effectively, and to bolster your toolkit as the gender finance field enters new frontiers.

An opportunity for those working and investing in specific regions to share knowledge, identify persistent blockages and areas for development. There will be regional coverage from South Asia, and Africa to Europe, LAC and beyond. Core goals are to identify shared leverage points for change and surface cross-pollinations, collaborations and deepen connections.

Ignites are talks by inspirational leaders in gender finance and adjacent fields, designed to kickstart action and new ideas. Our first is by Sandrine Dixson-Declève, an international and European climate, energy, sustainable development, sustainable finance, complex systems thought leader, on the intersection of gender and finance.