Sub-Saharan Africa requires an estimated $2tn by 2030 to build climate resilience.
The impact of this financing gap is most acute at the intersection of gender and climate. Women constitute around 70% of smallholder farmers across the continent and face heightened climate risks, alongside persistent constraints in accessing climate-resilient technologies, inputs, and markets. Yet, only 3% of climate finance is specifically aimed at enhancing gender equality, despite women and girls bearing a disproportionate share of climate impacts.
When climate shocks occur, women-led households experience deeper disruptions and longer recovery periods. At the same time, these populations play a central role in climate adaptation and the adoption of resilient technologies.
Over the past decade, funds operating at the gender-climate nexus have become a distinctive feature of Africa’s investment landscape. Their trajectories demonstrate that integrating gender equity and climate action into investment strategies is not only feasible but increasingly common.
Blended finance has become a keystone for these funds at the nexus of gender and climate. It plays a dual, transformative role: both existential, by enabling such funds to emerge, and operational, by supporting the deployment of their investment and impact theses.
Importantly, the rise of blended finance over the last decade has already delivered substantial results. Many of the funds in our sample simply would not have launched, or would have achieved far narrower impact, without concessional capital.
Concessional support has enabled these managers to reach meaningful scale, operate in high-risk markets, and invest in women-led and climate- focused enterprises that commercial capital has historically overlooked. This success is precisely what now allows for a deeper diagnostic: with a decade of practical experience, the sector is mature enough to assess how blended finance is being deployed and identify pathways for even greater effectiveness.
To dive deeper, I&P Ecosystems, in partnership with the CC Facility Learning Hub, managed by Convergence and CPI, explored how blended finance transforms the trajectories of gender– climate nexus funds below $100m in size. Drawing on a comprehensive literature review, a database sample of 46 funds, three fund case studies and more than 30 interviews with fund managers and fund investors, the study highlights how fund managers and investors have leveraged blended finance mechanisms to unlock catalytic capital for the gender-climate nexus.