Philanthropic Opportunity: Designing the Capital Stack for Gender and Youth Empowerment
A Curated Roundtable with Gender & Youth Sector Leaders and Philanthropists
Convenors: SAWF-IN | GenderSphere | The Southern Centre for Philanthropy & Impact
Description: A closed-door roundtable with gender sector leaders, women's funds, women philanthropists and the financing ecosystem, convened in the India Impact House alongside AVPN.
Format: Invitation-only roundtable
Funding for women's empowerment and gender equality faces not only a shortage of capital, but a capital-matching problem. The changes required—shifting norms and power structures, strengthening women's organisations and movements, expanding economic opportunity, and transforming institutions and markets are long-term, systemic and interdependent. No single instrument, funder or intervention can deliver them. Yet capital still arrives largely in one form: short, restricted and project-shaped.
This working session asks what fit-for-purpose capital looks like in practice. It moves past the question of why we should invest in women to ask what kind of investments are needed, for what purpose, and at what stage. The session seeks to take a sector view of harmonised and complementary financing: what would it take for different funders and forms of capital to each hold a different part of a complex system? But funding modalities are only half the problem. The harder work lies in rewiring the processes and relationships through which capital flows.
Participants will examine a range of funding models, exploring where each is effective, where it falls short, and how different forms of capital can be sequenced or blended to support more durable change. The real value of the session lies in learning from peers—hearing how others have funded women's empowerment and gender equality in practice, what trade-offs they have navigated, what they would do differently, and what lessons can be applied across different funding contexts.
The goal is to identify actionable opportunities for collaboration, such as pooled funds, co-funding platforms, shared due diligence, learning partnerships and improved approaches to measuring gender outcomes, and to develop a small set of post-convening actions that participating institutions can advance collectively or individually.
Who should attend: Foundations, family offices, corporate CSR leads, DFIs, impact fund managers and non profit leaders working on gender equality and youth empowerment.
Format: Opening remarks and a short panel, followed by facilitated table design sessions and open plenary.