Equality Fund: A New Model for Global Feminist Investing
Backed by a $300 million contribution from the Government of Canada, the Equality Fund unites gender-lens investing, bold government funding, and powerful, multi-sector philanthropy to unlock new capital for women's rights organizations and movements. To date, the Equality Fund has committed 53 million CAD to support over 300 organizations working in 85 countries across the Global South.
Guided by an unapologetic feminist analysis, our portfolio is 100 percent gender-aligned, making us one of the largest gender-lens investors in the world. The returns generated by our investments create a sustainable source of funding to finance our global grantmaking.
Investment is one part of the Equality Fund model and central to our core goal: to create an independent, scalable, and sustainable pipeline of resources for feminist movements. We are building a predictable source of funding that meets the needs of the short-term while planning for the future. To fuel momentum, we’re building products and tools of our own, and sharing them with investors everywhere.
Strengthening the GLI ecosystem through the development of new products
The Equality Fund recently launched the Equality Fund Gender-Lens Investing (GLI) Criteria, a comprehensive, free resource for investment decision-makers everywhere who are interested in unlocking a more impactful GLI approach. The Criteria are a set of screens that can be integrated into the investment due-diligence process to analyze how investment decisions impact women, girls, and trans people. The goal of these lenses is to guide more intentional, positively impactful investments that have the potential to unlock power, voice, and access for over half of the population.
Our public-market investments provide liquidity to help fuel our grantmaking. We utilize robust GLI criteria and frameworks for investment selection and impact monitoring such as Equileap, MSCI, Impax, WEF, World Bank, IRIS+, Grand Challenges Canada, the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and Thomson Reuters Refinitiv. With this work, we are helping to fill product gaps across the ecosystem by building new GLI products, such as:
The Equality Fund RockCreek Fixed Income Strategy, managed by RockCreek Group L.P., which utilizes Equileap data.
Equality Fund Global Gender Equality Delta Note and Equality Fund Fixed Yield Note issuance in partnership with RBC Capital Markets, tracking the Solactive Equileap Global Gender Equality 100 Index.
The Equality Fund’s outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO), RockCreek, began making the first investments on behalf of the Equality Fund Initiative Government-Funded Pool (EFGP) in December 2020, with the objective of generating sufficient returns to support the Equality Fund Initiative (EFI) grant-making activities, while addressing gender equality through an ambitious approach to gender-lens investing.
RockCreek uses industry standard data at the company level and a weighted-average methodology to measure the gender-lens and environmental impact profile of the EFGP portfolio. As commonly utilized by institutional investors, many of the measurements are compared to a global market-based benchmark — the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI).
Equality Fund’s public markets Gender lens investing strategy:
The Equality Fund RockCreek Fixed Income Strategy invests with corporate issuers that align with gender policies and governance. The portfolio invests primarily in global corporate securities whose issuers are based on Equileap gender data. Equileap provides gender equality data across a set of factors, allowing investors to make more informed decisions. Issuers are evaluated across a wide range of criteria, including gender balance in leadership and the workforce, equal compensation and work-life balance, and policies for gender equality, among other things.
Results, Challenges and Lessons Learned
As of March 31, 2023, the portfolio is fully invested with a 100% gender lens aligned portfolio. Each investment is sourced and researched with the objectives of creating impact and return in accordance with the Equality Fund Initiative of advancing its goals of gender equality.
The Equality Fund is proud to highlight the positive financial performance of the EFGP, which has resulted from its GLI strategy. For the most recent fiscal year, ending on 30/06/23, the investment portfolio has achieved a return of 10.6% net of investment management fees. This includes a net return of 0.3% for the final quarter, which represented the fourth consecutive quarterly gain. Since inception, the annualised return for the portfolio is 2.1%, net of investment management fees.
In terms of impact through promoting gender equality investments, RockCreek has sourced and researched almost 150 investment opportunities across public equities, fixed income, private debt and private equity on behalf of EFGP. In the public markets, investments are targeting gender equality through governance, social factors and environmental considerations. Private-market investments will target women-owned firms, women-led funds and women-focused products and services. All strategies aim to give a voice and bring attention to women investors that are often overlooked by institutions.
As funders of women’s rights organisations in the Global South, we also recognize that more must be done to ensure that GLI is truly accountable and transparent. Alongside other thought and practice leaders in the GLI community, we are actively working on standards, reporting, and meaningful tools to push the field further.
To navigate the tension of engaging in this system while rejecting old norms, our values challenge us to show up and activate the promise of gender-lens investing with a clear mission to shift power for lasting and meaningful change.
For more information, contact Adaora Ogbue, Director, Investment Strategy: investment@equalityfund.ca
September, 2023
This publication is made possible by the Government of Canada's Investment Readiness Program and CAFIID’s Gender Lens Investing Community of Practice
