G-SEARCh

Embedding gender equity in the DNA of companies

Who we are

The Gender Smart Enterprise Assistance Research Coalition (G-SEARCh) comprises a group of five, like-minded, impact investors committed to investing with a gender lens. The consortium includes AlphaMundi, Acumen, SEAF, Root Capital, and AHL Venture Partners.

What we’re doing

We support our respective portfolio companies with grant capital to integrate gender considerations across their business model. By creating G-SEARCh, consortium members recognize an opportunity to leverage our respective efforts to identify similar challenges, opportunities, lessons learned and replicable insights that could be shared with the broader investment community. More importantly, G-SEARCh consortium members have created a unique research opportunity to collate and analyze data spanning 15+ SMEs that are incorporating gender-smart interventions with the hope that this data will demonstrate the business case for incorporating gender-smart interventions across early-growth stage SMEs in emerging markets.

Building the business case

With support from Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and USAID’s Powering Agriculture Investment Alliance, we are partnering with the William Davidson Institute (WDI) at the University of Michigan as our research partner. WDI will support G-SEARCh by developing a research approach to test our assumptions, hypothesis and gather qualitative and quantitative data spanning these SMEs to hopefully build the base of evidence for this approach and develop toolkits and case studies to facilitate knowledge sharing with the broader sector.