As someone with a background in biochemistry, my new found awareness of the financing gap for moral capital propelled me to pivot to a career in finance. For this reason, I spent 4 years in consulting to speed up my learning curve on finance concepts and applications. However, there is a lot of value-add through this class that I could not achieve at my financial risk management job because it did not cover finance strategy.
I am really excited about the opportunity to learn about and recommend strategies for pooling, de-risking and leveraging finance in achieving sustainable goals especially in developing countries such as my home country, Nigeria. The preliminary research of gender financing for the [the client] has opened me up to the universe of sustainable investment with the case-study of the simple, yet powerful financial product – the bond. Before this project, I had a bit of confusion about the different terms in sustainable financing but now I can clearly delineate the difference between a green, social, sustainability, transition, and sustainability-linked bonds.
Previously, I was opposed to defining my focus area in the SDG because I did not want to be limited, but recently, I have a better understanding of my interests which includes healthcare, environment and education in that order. Consequently, I am thrilled to be working on the social bond (which includes health and education) and sustainability bond (which includes environment and social activities) because it is often neglected. Thus, I am enthusiastic about the approach that our team is considering which is to research on how the green bond market could be leveraged for gender financing in emerging markets. As this is novel because the gender bond has high potential yet is underutilized, I cannot wait to delve into this relevant topic in the sustainable investment space.