Unlocking the Multiplier Potential of Investing in Women and Children: New Guidance on Applying a Child Lens alongside Gender Lens Investing
by Cristina Bertolino
Chief, UNICEF Innovative Finance Hub
UNICEF, in collaboration with 2X Global, has developed new guidance to help investors apply a child lens alongside a gender lens in the investment process, enabling stronger outcomes for women, children, businesses and societies.
Investments that improve opportunities for women can also benefit children, families, and communities. Yet too often, investment strategies address gender equality and children's rights and wellbeing as separate issues, despite growing evidence that they are interconnected. Children's wellbeing is shaped not only by services that directly reach them, but also by the stability, agency and economic security of the adults and systems that surround them. Women's economic empowerment is therefore not only a gender equality issue, but also a child development issue.
Women and girls bear heavy burdens of inequality. For gender lens investors, considering children is particularly relevant because gender inequalities often begin in early childhood: as early as age two or three, children begin to internalise gender stereotypes. UNICEF highlights the importance of addressing these biases early, as they become more difficult to challenge later in life when social pressures to conform to gender norms intensify. These norms and inequalities shape opportunities and outcomes across health, education and labour market participation. At the same time, children are disproportionately affected by interconnected global challenges, including climate change, inequality and limited access to essential services. A child lens can therefore help gender investors identify opportunities to address gender norms and inequalities early, support women’s economic empowerment through childcare and family-friendly workplace policies, and ensure that products, services and digital platforms funded through gender initiatives do not adversely affect children’s safety, health and psychological well-being.
To support investors to apply a dual-gender and child lens, UNICEF is launching new guidance, developed in collaboration with 2X Global. The guidance is to support investors using the 2X Criteria to apply child lens considerations alongside their gender lens investing practices.
Child Lens Investing (CLI), pioneered by UNICEF, provides investors with a structured framework to consider children’s rights and well-being across asset classes, geographies, and the full investment lifecycle. The new guidance on applying a child lens with a gender lens supports investors to identify opportunities where investments can simultaneously strengthen women's economic empowerment and improve outcomes for children. It introduces child lens indicators that can be used alongside existing 2X Criteria requirements.
Investors using the guidance may consider issues such as family-friendly workplace policies, products and services that enhance the wellbeing of women and children, and risks affecting children in company operations and supply chains.
A common question is how investing through a gender lens benefits children. In many cases, it does support children as well, but these benefits are not always intentional, tracked, or fully realised. The new guidance helps investors identify where intentional action can strengthen outcomes for women, children and businesses. Women can benefit from better employment opportunities, greater financial security, and stronger agency in households, workplaces and markets. Children benefit from improved care, greater economic security and better access to products and services that support their healthy development. Together, these developments create longer-term benefits for stability in families and communities, tackling gender inequalities at the root and compounding economic gains across generations.
Businesses also benefit from applying the guidance on child lens investing within gender lens investing. Investments that strengthen women's workforce participation while supporting child wellbeing can reduce absenteeism and turnover, improve productivity and enhance operational efficiency.
The guidance strengthens investors’ ability to engage with companies to identify and manage risks across labour practices, supply chains, product safety and community impacts. It also creates opportunities for innovation, market expansion and stronger corporate reputation. For instance, a dual lens approach can help investors recognise opportunities that may otherwise be less visible, such as integrated maternal and child health, family-friendly workforce technologies, and financial services that support caregivers.
Investing in women and investing in children are not competing priorities. They are mutually reinforcing pathways to more inclusive, resilient and sustainable development. As Finnfund, member of 2X Global and part of the 2X Challenge initiative, puts it: “We believe that mainstreaming a child lens approach into the investment process brings important additional value to our work and helps materialise our intention to support inclusive development through our investments. Guidance and practical tools such as these, which support the investment process, are extremely helpful in increasing the understanding of how investments that support women's economic empowerment can also contribute to improved outcomes for children. By helping investors identify these connections, we believe they can strengthen investment decision-making, generate broader impact, and help mobilise private capital towards sustainable development in emerging markets”.
