Jeannette Gurung

Jeannette has over 30 years of experience designing and delivering capacity strengthening programs to integrate gender and women’s empowerment into climate, agriculture and environment-related  organizations and programs in over 25 countries. She has been an innovator at the nexus of gender equality and climate-related sectors, working with both public and private organizations and projects. She is founder and Executive Director of WOCAN - a global network with over 1500 members in 114 countries- to support capacity building for women’s leadership and empowerment and gender integration with teams of WOCAN members in Africa, Asia and Latin America. She is a thought-leader in innovative financing for climate, gender and impact investing and creator of the W+ Standard ™ to measure, quantify and monetize impacts of projects and supply chains on women’s empowerment, through the use of a results-based financing approach designed to provide incentives to projects and companies and new revenue streams to community-level women’s groups and enterprises. Jeannette is co-founder of the developing Women and Climate Impact Fund -  a unique blended finance social investment fund to provide capital to projects that impact women's empowerment and gender equality while reducing the effects of climate change, while using the W+ Standard to assure quality impacts.  From her home base in Hawai’i, she is developing a Climate-resilient & Agricultural Innovation Hub for Women Farmers in Hawai’i County, to pilot innovations and practices to achieve climate and economic resilience through support to women farmers.  

Jeannette has expertise in certification and ESG standards, Voluntary Carbon Markets, impact measurement, monitoring and evaluation, training and facilitation, research, gender and organizational analysis, policy advocacy and network building. She has a MSc in forestry from the University of Washington, and a PhD in Gender and Development from the University of East Anglia. She is currently a member of  the Climate Impact X International Advisory Council, Solutions Group for Livestock and Climate Finance of Livestock for Development, Sustainable Development Advisory Group of Verra, the Women in Carbon network, and the Gender and Environment Data Alliance Technical Guidance and Learning Working Group. She is a Strategic Advisor to the Climate Finance Accelerator of the U.K.She has lived in several countries of South and SE Asia and worked in 25 countries.