Equally important, we apply a gender lens across all our investment portfolios, ensuring that all of the innovations we support are gender responsive and provide quality employment and leadership opportunities for women. We seek to build long term partnerships with innovators, reinvesting when possible and tailoring flexible, patient funding as companies evolve and mature.

Our long-term partnership with Be Girl is a clear example of this track record in practice.  Be Girl, a social enterprise headquartered in Mozambique, designs and distributes affordable, reusable menstrual products and pairs them with sexual and reproductive health and rights education for adolescent girls and boys in underserved markets, closing both the product access gap and the education gap that keep girls out of school and exposed to long-term health risks. The company is founded and led by Diana Garcia and a local management team. GCC first backed the company in 2018 with grant funding to launch and test their model in Mozambique. Since then, the company has shifted from a direct-to-consumer to a B2B model, selling to governments, UN agencies and NGOs. It has scaled into Angola, Ghana and Egypt, distributed over 1 million products and reached more than 530,000 adolescent girls and boys with educational programming. Last year, GCC reinvested USD $450K through a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) note, alongside USD $50K in technical assistance to launch a pilot with Zimbabwe's Ministry of Women Affairs and SME Development. This new investment positions the company to grow without compromising affordability as it works toward reaching 1.2 million girls and boys by 2030. 

What challenges and barriers are you working on addressing? 

After fifteen years of funding early-stage innovation, we are actively trying to solve for the system architecture required to scale innovations. We have learned that we need to work to ensure that systems, particularly in the public sector, are able to invest and take innovations to scale when they have proven their potential. We recognize that the pathway to significant scale (national/international) requires engagement with systems close to the solutions and location of scale; AND, that you cannot just turn up with a fully-tested innovation to a government or partner and ask them to ‘adopt it at scale’; AND current global ‘scale’ funding mechanisms are not doing this work. 

As part of this work we are deploying a new instrument, Ecosystem Investment Grants, that are intentionally designed to fund collaboration that solves barriers to scale. We will work with partners to make innovations more investable, to coordinate the capital stack, and to work with government counterparts at all levels to lower the cost of revenue acquisition and capital acquisition.

What is your call to action for our membership? 

CAFIID members bring networks, local relationships, and sector expertise that too often sit siloed inside individual portfolios. Ecosystem Investment Grants are built to combine exactly these assets against specific barriers to scale, not fund them in isolation. If that's a fit for what your organization brings, find us at the 2X Summit, UNGA, GIIN and other gatherings this fall.

What are you looking forward to in the coming months? 

We recently launched Nexa Lighthouse, which will fund locally led innovations that address the growing health impacts of climate change across Asia and the Pacific. It is co-led by GCC (in partnership with Global Affairs Canada | Affaires mondiales Canada) and AVPN, together with Bayer Foundation, India Health Fund, Novo Nordisk Foundation, Sanofi Foundation, and Temasek Foundation. It brings together Nexa, a global climate and health initiative co-led by GCC and the Science for Africa Foundation, with The Lighthouse Fund, an AVPN-led initiative that invests at the intersection of climate and health. Nexa has already launched its first funding call for Africa and the Americas. Its funding priorities were shaped by the largest climate and health survey to date, which engaged 6,400 respondents across 107 low- and middle-income countries. Nexa Lighthouse extends this work into Asia and the Pacific. Nexa Lighthouse will provide catalytic funding for growth-stage climate and health innovations that strengthen health systems adaptation and resilience, reducing health harms from mosquito-borne infections (dengue and malaria), extreme heat, and poor air quality. The first funding call for Nexa Lighthouse for innovators in Asia and the Pacific will open in October 2026.

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