Rallying Cry's Carey Bohjanen on investing in gender and climate across agribusiness in Africa
Carey Bohjanen, founder of the Rallying Cry Initiative – in partnership with Dutch development bank FMO – and MD of Sustainable Finance Advisory, outlines how she engages top finance and industrial leaders via ecosystem level initiatives to shift business as "unusual" for better outcomes.
Carey introduces the Rallying Cry Initiative and the main barriers the scheme's work is trying to address (02:46) including short-term, profit driven focus where true costs are unequally borne by the people and planet and power being held by the relative few.
The Rallying Cry, in partnership with FMO is about catalysing private sector investment in gender and climate focussed on agribusiness in Kenya and Zambia. The initiative showcases the intersectionality of Africa, women, food-security, and climate change (06:03). Lack of access to capital, markets, networks, and technology creates barriers for agribusinesses to scale (07:00). The Rallying Cry works to create intermediary capital to reach the ground level working with local commercial banks to create relevant financial products and services.
Working with local implementation partners The Rallying Cry is better able to utilise the rich contextual knowledge and understanding to get business done (10:13). Carey goes on to explain how these empowered and solution driven women are light the world needs (12:10).
More balanced decision making based on ground-level insights by amplifying the work of these women in global climate forums such as COP27 is vital (14:23). Carey then goes on to explain some of the innovative strategic partnerships with organisations like WOCAN developing gender credits to be bundled with carbon credits (20:32).
She closes with a call to action stating, ‘back and invest in female climate entrepreneurs’ and female fund managers for better outcomes for people, planet and profit’ (25:03).
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