Our third dealsharing online session will be on "Genderlens investing in a development context".
We have the pleasure to welcoming Audrey Selian from Rianta Capital and Suzanne Biegel from Catalyst at Large.
Our third dealsharing online session will be on "Genderlens investing in a development context".
Please register now, through this link.
We have the pleasure to welcoming Audrey Selian from Rianta Capital, presenting three of their current investment opportunities:
- Tamul Plates (Assam, India): Tamul Plates produces and markets biodegradable disposable dinnerware, including plates of various shapes and sizes as well as cutlery, through community-owned micro-enterprises spread across north-east India. The company sources arecanut leaves from a wide community of low-income/tribal women, and provides quality, entirely sustainable green alternatives to urban and global customers - generating sustainable livelihoods amongst rural women and youth.
- Aakar Innovations (Maharashtra, India): Aakar is a hybrid social enterprise that enables women to produce and distribute affordable, high-quality, fully compostable sanitary napkins (India’s first and only!) within their communities while simultaneously raising awareness and sensitization of menstrual hygiene management. Their business model is also comprised of a B2B component based on sales of production equipment.
- Mela Artisans (Maharashtra, India): Mela Artisans promotes a sustainable livelihood for artisans, with a high focus on gender, by providing a customer base for their handmade products. Mela Artisans curates authentic artisan products and presents them to a global audience of shoppers, online and in stores. Mela has generated orders resulting in over $2 million going directly to artisans over the past 3 years which has created over 2500 full-time jobs during that time. The company forges personal relationships with their artisans and actively promotes health, education, and development projects within artisan communities.
Furthermore, we are happy to pronounce that Suzanne Biegel from Catalyst at Large will share a keynote on "Genderlens investing in the context of development" with us too.
Looking forward to your participation!
Suzanne Biegel
Suzanne Biegel is founder of Catalyst at Large, and Senior Gender Lens Investing Adviser at Wharton Social Impact Initiative, Wharton Business School. She recently created a pilot initiative to bring together investors with a gender lens, called Women Effect, which is now at Wharton.
She is an active impact investor and philanthropist. Her work focuses on investing with a women and girls / gender lens, and her own portfolio is directed with a broader set of impact and gender lenses. She is also the Investment Director for SPRING, a project of DFID, Nike Foundation, USAID, and DFAT for ventures with a positive effect on adolescent girls in 8 countries.
She is the founder of Clearly Social Angels in the UK, part of ClearlySo, and was a founding board member of Confluence Philanthropy in the US. She holds several advisory board roles. She founded Women in Social Finance in London and co-founded the Values Based Investment group of Women Donors Network. She is a Catto fellow at The Aspen Institute. She is also a member of the Toniic/100% Impact Network. And a fellow for SDG 5 for Tribe Impact Capital.
She received the Beacon award for philanthropy and impact investing in the UK in 2015. She is a graduate of Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. A native New Yorker, Suzanne has been based in London for the past 7 years
Audrey Selian
Audrey Selian currently serves as Director of the Artha Initiative associated with Rianta Capital Zurich and is a team member/advisor to the Halloran Philanthropies.
She has been active in the impact investing sector since 2006, and is founder of ArthaPlatform.com, an online impact investment platform that is designed to tackle the economics of due diligence around high impact, small scale SMEs/SGBs. Through the associated vehicle Artha Networks Inc., the platform tool has been licensed for Latin America and is actively being considered for deployment in other sectors and geographies. Audrey has a background in management consulting from PricewaterhouseCoopers, and her entrepreneurial experience includes several years spent in business development, marketing and sales at an NSF-funded software start-up called Wireless Grids Corporation. She currently serves as a trustee for several non-profit organizations, sits on the board of a number of for-profits, and holds a PhD in Technology Policy & Development Studies from The Fletcher School at Tufts University. She also holds degrees from The London School of Economics and Wellesley College. In 2003-4 she was a doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.