3rd annual report demonstrates initial impact of the Fund’s 18 million diverse, global portfolio
NEW YORK | July 18, 2022 – The Rockefeller Foundation released its annual Zero Gap Fund: 2021 State of the Portfolio report capturing the crucial role that catalytic capital plays in enabling investment solutions to solve the world’s most pressing challenges. Across its seven investments to date, the Fund has mobilized $582 million in private finance toward a diverse portfolio of high-impact investment strategies. The Fund added two investments in 2021, bringing total commitments to $18 million of the $30 million fund.
The Zero Gap Fund was launched in 2019 in partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It deploys patient, risk-tolerant, and flexible capital into promising, impact-driven financial strategies and mechanisms that seek to boost large-scale private investment in advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“Innovative financial mechanisms like those supported by the Zero Gap Fund demonstrate the power of catalytic capital to cultivate and scale impact-driven investment strategies. With the SDGs being undercut by Covid-19, climate change, and other crises, the need is both critical and urgent for investment solutions that marry impact and return and mobilize significant private capital to such strategies” said Maria Kozloski, Senior Vice President, Innovative Finance, The Rockefeller Foundation. “As the Zero Gap Fund’s portfolio matures, we are seeing encouraging results even in the face of broader instability in the market.”
by Durreen Shahnaz
In her own words, the founder of Impact Investment Exchange tells us why climate change and feminism come hand in hand.
April 8th, 2022 – Impact Investment Exchange’s (IIX) Women’s Livelihood Bond™ (WLB) Series wins Environmental Finance’s 2022 Bond Awards for Innovation. The award recognizes IIX for its use of proceeds in the latest issuance in the WLB™ Series, the US$30M WLB4Climate, which is set to impact an estimated 500,000 women and girls across South and Southeast Asia, transforming them into agents of climate action.
A data-driven, quantitative approach to sustainable investing is a must to keep pace with an increasingly complex investment landscape.
Also called orange bonds, this relatively new class of sustainable financing aims to remove gender bias and improve women’s equality and living standards in developing countries.
Whether it’s activists Xiye Bastida, Destiny Hodges, Sônia Guajajara, and Gloria Walton rallying Black, Indigenous or people of color (BIPOC) communities typically excluded from the climate dialogue; financiers Geeta Aiyer and Durreen Shahnaz bringing much needed investments in sustainable development; STEM pioneers Anousheh Ansari or Jennifer Holmgren catalyzing climate tech breakthroughs; or corporate sustainability leaders such as Ashley Allen and Elysa Hammond, each individual is making her mark in unique and undeniable ways, advocating for causes close to their hearts.
Women have made great strides in the workplace in