Calvert Foundation Announces Commitment to Invest $20 Million Through the WIN-WIN Initiative

Bethesda, MD, September 24, 2014 — Calvert Foundation announced a commitment to invest $20 million through the Women Investing in Women Initiative (WIN-WIN) today at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York. This new stage of investment will focus on empowering girls and women through increasing access to clean energy technologies and fuels.

The new investment follows an initial $20 million investment through WIN-WIN to empower women around the world. Building on findings from the WIN-WIN pilot, Calvert Foundation will partner with the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves and others to identify investment targets that increase access to clean energy products for developing countries, a sector that has an outsized impact on women’s health and livelihoods. The investments will be made through financial intermediaries and funds.

Calvert Foundation President and CEO Jennifer Pryce commented “WIN-WIN showed us that viewing our investment portfolio through a gender lens could open up opportunities to empower women in new and powerful ways. When we processed the findings of the initial WIN-WIN portfolio, we saw that our investments in organizations that develop products like clean cookstoves and solar lighting were creating a big impact, because they address women’s health at a very basic level.”

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves will partner with Calvert Foundation to provide technical assistance to social enterprises that develop and market these technologies. Calvert Foundation will also leverage the Alliance’s awareness-building work, standards and testing program, and research platform, all of which contribute to enabling the market and increasing demand for quality clean cooking technologies and fuels.

“Clean cookstoves and fuels represent one of the most cost-effective mechanisms for addressing climate change while delivering women’s health and livelihood benefits,” said Radha Muthiah, executive director of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. “Donors and investors need to work together to structure the right instruments to finance the growth of the clean cooking sector. That’s why our partnership with Calvert Foundation and WIN-WIN is so important. It gives us a window into the private capital markets, whose support will be critical to meeting the needs of the 3 billion people worldwide affected or dependent on food cooked on open fires.”

Calvert Foundation expects to start making investments in November, and begin raising capital through its network of 5,000+ individual investors through its online investment platform Vested.org.

About Calvert Foundation

Calvert Foundation enables people to invest for social good. Through its flagship Community Investment Note, Calvert Foundation has raised $1 billion in investment from more than 15,000 investors to invest in hundreds of nonprofits and social enterprises worldwide. Investor dollars empower women, fund the construction of affordable housing, provide loans to small business owners, increase access to health care, and support fair trade and sustainable agriculture.

About Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a public-private partnership hosted by the United Nations Foundation to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and protect the environment by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. The Alliance’s 100 by ‘20 goal calls for 100 million households to adopt clean and efficient cookstoves and fuels by 2020. The Alliance is working with its public, private and non-profit partners to help overcome the market barriers that currently impede the production, deployment, and use of clean cookstoves and fuels in developing countries.

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