Knowledge Hub · Advanced Practices in Gender Lens Investing
How Uganda’s first resident, women-led gender lens fund turns governance into a power-shifting engine.
Advanced Practice framework
Introducing Advanced Practice
Financial systems are not neutral; they are shaped by choices and practices that either reinforce or dismantle systemic inequities. Advancing gender equality through finance takes more than moving capital. It means addressing the underlying ways in which power, privilege, and bias operate in financial systems.
Over the past few years, Criterion Institute has formalized a system of Advanced Practice to make these shifts visible and replicable. It is built on four guiding interconnected principles – Will to Act, Integrity, Accountability, and Inclusion – and honors trailblazing fund managers who are already adopting practices that redistribute power. In this case study we spotlight Inua Impact Fund as a demonstration of how a first-time, locally domiciled fund is shifting power in finance through innovative practices.
“We celebrate not only what makes Inua Capital unique in its approach to gender and power, but also how their intuitive and intentional practices are actively reshaping the Ugandan ecosystem to be more just, inclusive, and transformative.”
Founded in 2023, Inua Capital launched the Inua Impact Fund, Uganda’s first resident, women-led, gender lens private equity fund. The name Inua, derived from the Kiswahili word for “uplift,” reflects the fund’s mission: to elevate local enterprises by providing both capital and the tools for long-term resilience.
The fund addresses a long-standing gap in Uganda’s financial system: the shortage of risk capital for SMEs, which make up over 70% of national employment but are systematically excluded from finance. Women-owned and women-led businesses face even higher barriers. Inua’s strategy emphasizes smaller ticket sizes – ranging from $100,000 to $500,000 – and employs a variety of instruments, including equity, quasi-equity and revenue-based finance.
From inception, Inua embedded GDEI, ESG, and impact management into the fund’s DNA. Rather than treating these as compliance requirements, the team built comprehensive systems – ESG and gender lens investing policies, safeguarding mechanisms, and an independent ESG+ and Impact Committee – before making its first investment. Early investments in Forna Health Foods, Equator Chocolate, and Flow Uganda illustrate the model in practice, with fund manager compensation linked to ESG and GDEI outcomes.
Inua reframes governance from a compliance obligation into a mechanism for accountability, transparency, and redistribution of power – baked into the governance of its own fund structure and of its portfolio companies.
Actions and implementation
How this practice shifts power
By incorporating gender accountability into every process – team, portfolio, and fund level – Inua ensures responsibility for equity and impact is systemic, shared, and enforceable.
Actions and implementation
Measurable change
Although still in its early years, Inua’s portfolio is already demonstrating tangible results from embedding gender and power analysis into governance and investment processes. By decentralizing responsibility across staff, fund managers, and portfolio companies, and requiring every investee to adopt structured action plans, Inua has created outcomes that show how different practices lead to improved social and financial performance.
The gender outcomes are equally significant. More than half of Inua’s investee companies are women-owned, and women now hold 58% of board seats across the portfolio – a structural shift in leadership, not symbolic representation. As the first Uganda-domiciled, women-led gender lens private equity fund, Inua signals to the industry that first-time managers can achieve strong early financial and social results while maintaining rigorous ESG and gender standards.
“When funds embed equity into their daily practices, they don’t just move capital, they reshape markets.”
Lessons for the field
Advanced practices spread only when donors, foundations, and private investors ask for them. The lessons below pair what Inua did with the specific move a standard-setting asset owner can make.
Inua built credibility with an external ESG+ Committee, grievance mechanisms, and policy frameworks before its first investments – absorbing real upfront cost to do so.
By hiring a gender expert at inception and tying ESG and GDEI goals to staff reviews and bonuses, Inua made equity core to daily operations, not siloed in one role.
Multiple investors requiring different templates strained Inua’s small team – a systemic issue, as early funds are held to standards designed for larger managers.
Capital alone proved insufficient; cultural norms still hindered women-led SMEs. Inua responded with action plans, inclusivity training, and funded formalization.
By piloting impact-linked bonuses and planning Impact Carry, Inua tied its own upside to ESG, GDEI, and impact – shifting accountability upward to fund managers.
Inua is one of the fund managers documented through Criterion Institute’s Advanced Practice framework: trailblazers transforming systems while running disciplined, high-performing funds. These case studies show what becomes possible when power and gender analysis move to the core of how capital is deployed.
