Jeannette Gurung

Founder and Executive Director, WOCAN

Women’s empowerment is the key to unlocking more value and bigger wins for climate impact investments and nature-based solutions.

Accelerating impact and integrity

“Women play major roles in agricultural production and forest management and can offer unique perspectives, expertise and problem-solving capabilities,” says Jeannette Gurung, Founder and Executive Director of WOCAN, a women-led international membership network. “Their involvement isn’t ‘a social cause.’ There’s an actual business case for it that enables investors and carbon credit buyers to lower risks and achieve higher levels of integrity, in projects that otherwise often exclude them from project benefits and engagement.

For various reasons — including gender norms and time poverty due to family responsibilities — women are usually excluded from leadership roles, decision-making processes, financial rewards, technological assistance and key resources. That’s a negative for climate change mitigation and adaptation and climate investments.

This is a win for the women, a win for
the project developers and a win for the
buyers of W+ social impact credits.

A market based system that incentivises and rewards women’s empowerment outcomes

In 2014, WOCAN launched the W+ Standard™, a certification framework and market-based, results-based financial mechanism, which rewards projects that combine climate action with women’s empowerment. Projects are independently verified, and the results are translated into W+ credits, which can be sold to corporates, investors, public institutions or individuals with at least 20% of the revenue from unit sales going to local women’s groups. Gurung notes: “monetising social outcomes” is a way to provide women with an alternative revenue stream while unlocking new investment in climate projects that promote gender equality.

The proof of concept was demonstrated in an award-winning  project — a biogas project in Nepal, where the WOCAN team measured time savings for 7,200 women who accessed electricity and clean energy. “The resulting time-saving and revenue women obtained from the sale of W+ credits provided them with opportunities to pursue income generation and implement climate adaptation activities.” The project developers — who were measuring and selling carbon credits — hadn’t considered this impact on women’s lives. Since then, over 18 projects have generated  four million W+ credits, available for sale. “This is a win for the women, a win for the project developers and a win for the buyers of W+ social impact credits,” concludes Gurung.