Delivering lasting change through women centered-solutions
We drive this by increasing access to empowering technology, resources, and finance for women
Mobilising capital for solutions that impact women
Shell Foundation aspires to ensure that as many women as men are impacted, helping women to raise their incomes with clean energy. We are looking to innovate, take risks, and find agile partnerships that can help us structure new financial mechanisms to move the flow of capital to products and services that will reach women.
In 2021, $600 billion of climate finance was allocated, but only 2% was deployed with a gender lens. At Shell Foundation, we want to see cross-cutting change across our programmes and the clean energy sector. Applying a gender lens in targeting and project designs safeguards our commitment to equity and high-potential solutions that impact women across our portfolio.
A focus on helping women across our portfolio
Applying gender intentionality has been shown to improve commercial performance while delivering better impact for women.
Shell Foundation applies a gender lens across all areas of its operations to increase access to products, resources, and finance for women and entrepreneurs.
Shell Foundation has played a catalytic role in helping S4S create the foundations of a scalable business model. Working with Shell Foundation led us to forge partnership with State Bank and catalysed over $5 million in financing for rural women entrepreneurs. Technical assistance from Shell Foundation helped us develop playbooks to enable women entrepreneurs find high value markets for the their produce.”
We incorporate a gender lens in four critical areas
Evidence driven gender analysis
We conduct gender analysis and have minimum criteria as part of our grantee screening, due diligence, and annual reporting process. The gender analysis looks at all business areas – including leadership, workplace equity, the business’s value chain, use of sex-disaggregated data, and how products and services may impact women.
Dedicated funding – ringfenced for women
For select grantees, we provide dedicated funding and technical assistance to incentivise testing innovative gender-inclusive strategies that aim to improve business performance. We also provide gender technical assistance through training, mentoring, and advisory services to strengthen gender responsive actions to our priority partners and co-investors.
Catalysing business innovation
We seek opportunities to unlock business innovation using a gender lens as a first thought, not an afterthought. We identify market gaps where new business models centered around serving women are needed to ensure equitable access to energy and sustainable mobility solutions.
Bringing industry change for gender-inclusive models
We develop and share evidence, data, and practical resources to support investors and entrepreneurs on their gender inclusion journeys. We support ecosystem initiatives and are a member of the 2X Collaborative.
Gender reports
