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2X Global: Unlocking gender-smart capital at scale

Dear Friend,

We’re here in your inbox at an unusual time this month, but for a very good reason!

Welcome to the Summit Special Edition, where we’ll give you insights into what will be on the agenda and driving the conversations at the upcoming 2X Global Summit 2024, which is starting one week from now, in Nairobi, Kenya.

Formerly called our Annual Members Meeting, the 2X Global Summit is the annual convening of 2X Global members and strategic partners. This year’s summit, co-hosted by MEDA, will bring together over 200 representatives drawn from across the spectrum of finance - from fund managers to DFIs, family offices to foundations, pension funds, banks and more.

This year’s theme Solutions for Systems-Level Change, reflects our thinking and approach in crafting the Summit - that it must be a forum not just for conversation, but for bold collective action.

As such, the Summit is designed in such a way as to facilitate opportunities for meaningful connection and collaboration between stakeholders and in so doing, catalysing progress on gender finance and unlocking more capital for women.

The Summit is also designed to be a dynamic, immersive learning experience, with exclusive expert insights on the most relevant topics, honing in on the areas with the greatest promise and potential for women’s economic empowerment.

Topics we will examine over the course of the three-day Summit include the gender-climate nexus, generating more investment for women in technology, the care economy, combatting GBVH and deep dives into exciting initiatives to advance gender lens investing standards.

Investing in Women in Tech will be the specific theme of the Plenary Day at the 2X Global Summit on September 17th, with several intensive sessions planned analysing women-powered innovations in agritech, climate tech, healthtech and fintech.

At the event, we will also launch 2X Certification, an independent and universally available mechanism that seeks to drive greater transparency, accountability and credibility in the field of gender lens investing.

Keep going to explore articles, research and op-eds we’re reading, sparked by our Summit theme, sessions and speakers.

In Community,

2X Global team

Summit Reads

Thoughts from our Co-Host on the first 2X Global Summit in Africa Dr Dorothy Nyambi, President and CEO of MEDA, our 2024 co-host, penned this thoughtful post for our Field Notes blog, where she sets the stage for the discussions by examining the state of play for gender finance in Africa.

Digitalisation to close the gender gap. African Business examines the ways digitalisation can help close the gender gap for women entrepreneurs in Africa, from digitally supported lending solutions, online booking apps to the wealth of knowledge available for capacity building. The article quotes Greta Bull, Director of Women’s Economic Empowerment at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who will be the featured speaker during the closing plenary on September 17 at the 2X Global Summit.

Challenges and opportunities facing women in fintech. Omoneka Musa Oyier, MEDA’s Director of Business Value Creation, ventilates the challenges and opportunities facing women in fintech, in this recent blog post where she proposes solutions to tackling the disparities in investment in women tech entrepreneurs and in usage of technology by women entrepreneurs. She will be a part of the Summit, leading a panel on empowering women in Fintech.

Pump and Go. This startup is seeking to increase productivity by reducing pumping time and effort for nursing mothers in the workforce through their lactation room design and services. Founder Patrice Meagher, a mother of four herself, says the service can shave 15 minutes off each pumping session and has got some commercial real estate developers and other large firms on board.

Women spearheading research into an overlooked medium for medical diagnostics. What useful health data could we glean from menstrual blood and could it be a long-overlooked, non-invasive alternative for medical diagnostic testing? The New Yorker profiles women-led companies developing ways to use menstrual blood to test for a range of conditions, from diabetes to STDs to endometriosis.

AI for Africa: what’s driving impact? With the 2024 Summit being hosted in the Silicon Savannah, as Kenya’s vibrant, continent-leading technology hub is known, this new suite of reports from GSMA, ‘AI for Africa: Use Cases Delivering Impact’ provide on the ground insights from Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, showing what’s working and how when it comes to deploying AI on the continent. And for a useful precursor to these reports, explore GSMA’s Mobile Gender Gap report, issued earlier in the year.

Standard-Setting and GLI - where we’ve been, where we are. GLI standard-setting will be a big focus at the 2024 Summit- these two blog posts from our 2023 Summit, about the ARISE initiative funded by Global Affairs Canada and about the evolving standard setting landscape, provide valuable context.

The end of a fossil fuel era. The United Kingdom will close its last coal plant this month, marking the relatively rapid end of an era of 140-plus years of coal-powered energy, as the country moves towards greener energy sources. In 1990, coal was still the source of most of the country’s electricity, but the last three decades have seen a rapid shift away.

Women-led agriculture collectives in Chad show a path to economic freedom. In Chad, women are using collective action to gain autonomy and land rights, and are economically empowering themselves and their children in the process, by joining agricultural collectives.

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