Since our inception, Convergence has been committed to gender equality. However, it took a push from our funders the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and Global Affairs Canada (GAC)’s for us to become more intentional and concrete about how we integrate gender equality in our work. In early 2020, with support from DFAT, we were able to train our entire staff on gender equality and gender-lens investing and develop a dedicated strategy for gender internally. GAC, through its Feminist International Assistance Policy, also encouraged us to prioritize gender in our work, which led us to reassess our performance measurement framework to more holistically report against gender targets.

Now, gender equality and women’s economic empowerment are top of mind across nearly all levels of our organization, including how we collect data on deals, our selection criteria for grantees, and our organizational culture.

Read our recently published Convergence Gender Guide, which goes into more detail about Convergence’s gender journey and how we have refined our gender approach over the years. The document discusses the intersection of blended finance and gender and shares how we have integrated gender across Convergence in our culture, knowledge products, communications, events, trainings, data, deal flow, grant programs, membership, and network.

Though this guiding document is primarily for our own staff to understand the importance of gender equality in what we do, we also hope it can be useful as a guide to others in the space who are just beginning their gender equality journey. The guide is a living document that will be updated regularly as we learn from our experiences and incorporate feedback from others in the gender equality and gender-lens investing space.