From 2022 to 2024, I served as Program Coordinator for Invest2Equal, an initiative created by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) — the private sector arm of the World Bank Group — in partnership with the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi). The program brought together 16 private equity and venture capital fund managers operating in emerging markets, from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe to the Middle East, and asked them to do something deceptively simple: make specific, measurable, time-bound commitments to advance gender equality. In their own firms. In their portfolios. On the record.
The final case study publication — which I researched and wrote — came out in late 2024. But the lessons I carried out of that program are ones I'm still thinking about.
The numbers that made the ask urgent
Before you can convince anyone to change, you have to make them understand the scale of what isn't working.
In emerging markets, women hold just 11 percent of senior investment positions in private equity and venture capital firms. Only 7 percent of female entrepreneurs in those markets receive equity investment capital. These aren't fringe statistics — they represent a structural failure that plays out in boardrooms, term sheets, and hiring panels every single day.
The counterargument to inaction is equally clear. IFC research found that fund managers with gender-balanced investment teams — where women hold 30 to 70 percent of leadership roles — generate returns up to 20 percent higher. Portfolio companies with gender-balanced leadership carry valuations 25 percent greater than those without. Limited partners, when surveyed, said they were willing to allocate twice as much capital to firms with greater gender diversity.
This is not a values argument. It is a performance argument. And yet the gap persists.
What the program actually did
Invest2Equal wasn't a pledge drive. The 16 fund managers who participated — collectively managing over $18 billion in assets — spent 18 months in structured peer learning, one-on-one expert mentoring, policy reviews, and accountability check-ins. By the program's end, they had made 62 concrete commitments.
What did that look like in practice? A few things struck me.
Horizon Capital, a private equity firm backing entrepreneurs in Ukraine and Moldova, built a dedicated People Advisory team that supported its portfolio companies in executive searches. Over three years, that team helped hire 47 executives — 50 percent of them women. They didn't wait for the pipeline to materialize; they built the pipeline.
AC Ventures in Indonesia took a different route, making gender representation a competitive differentiator. When they joined the program, women already made up 50 percent of their senior leadership. By articulating that as a strategic asset — not just an HR metric — they attracted more capital and gained access to a stronger pipeline of female founders. Today, 40 percent of their portfolio companies are owned or founded by women.
Navis Capital Partners in Southeast Asia focused inward first. They trained their entire team of over 100 professionals to recognize and counter unconscious bias, then built out parental leave, anti-harassment, and flexible work policies. Within six months of piloting those practices with a cohort of portfolio companies, the companies reported measurable progress — including appointing dedicated internal champions to sustain the work.
Mediterra Capital, headquartered in Istanbul, took on one of the hardest topics: sexual harassment in portfolio companies spread across more than ten countries, each with different legal frameworks and cultural norms. Their approach was to organize workshops for HR managers at investee companies, help them understand local legal landscapes, and build enforceable policies. Two of those portfolio companies subsequently earned 'Great Place to Work' certifications.
India Alternatives, based in Mumbai, set a target that at least one-third of its portfolio companies be owned or led by women, and that women sit on at least half of its investees' boards. They surpassed both goals. Their CEO, Shivani Bhasin Sachdeva, put it simply: women control 60 to 80 percent of consumption decisions in India, representing a $1.5 trillion market opportunity. The gender lens wasn't separate from the investment thesis — it was the investment thesis.
What I took away
Coordinating a program like this across 16 firms, multiple time zones, and a range of organizational cultures taught me a few things I didn't expect.
The biggest barrier to change is rarely ideology. Most of the resistance I encountered wasn't from people who opposed gender equality in principle — it was from people who didn't know where to start, or who feared that changing their processes would mean lowering their standards. Peer learning dissolved that anxiety faster than any top-down mandate could. When a fund manager from Southeast Asia described how they restructured their hiring panel and saw their deal flow improve, the fund manager from Eastern Europe in the next session started asking questions instead of objections.
Data is the permission structure. What I saw repeatedly was that once firms started collecting sex-disaggregated data — on their own teams, on their portfolio companies — the conversation shifted. You can't argue with the gap when the gap is visible. And when you start measuring progress, the progress accelerates.
The hard work happens between the sessions. The peer learning events were valuable, but the actual change happened in the months in between, when a fund manager had to sit down with their HR lead, rewrite a policy, and decide whether to make it public. That's where commitment becomes culture.
Why this work shaped what came next
I've held passports from countries I've never lived in. I've consulted for the World Bank, and built products aimed at a region I understand from the inside. The through line across all of it — the journalism, the consulting, the platform-building — is the same question: who gets access, and on what terms?
Invest2Equal sharpened my understanding of how capital moves, and how intentional design can redirect it. Those fund managers didn't transform their firms because they were told to. They transformed because they were given evidence, community, and structured support — and then held accountable for the commitments they made publicly.
That's not so different from what I'm trying to build with LagomPlan: a platform that gives discerning Latin American travelers the infrastructure to make choices that reflect their values and their sophistication. Different sector, same logic.
The full case study publication — Fund Managers Advancing Gender Equality in Private Equity and Venture Capital: Lessons Learned from IFC's Invest2Equal Program — is available on the IFC website. It contains the detailed stories of five of the 16 participating fund managers, and their recommendations for anyone looking to begin this work.
If you're building something in the gender-lens investing space — or simply curious about what institutional change actually looks like from the inside — I'd love to talk.
