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RIYADH: Financing and talent pipelines are putting women “at the forefront” of the clean energy shift, Lisa Kurbiel, head of secretariat, Joint SDG Fund at the UN, told Arab News at the second Creative Women Forum in Riyadh this week.

The forum runs from Nov. 4-6, with an expanded three-day program featuring keynotes, workshops, panels, solo talks and interactive sessions.

Kurbiel said that fund programs were boosting women’s participation in the energy transition in developing countries.

“The fund that I help manage, which is a financing mechanism for the UN development system, is trying to de-risk investments across renewable energy.”

She cited Zimbabwe, where a partnership with Old Mutual launched a renewable energy investment fund backed by government policy.

Old Mutual is a pan-African financial services group serving retail and corporate clients in 12 countries, with multiple stock exchange listings and a workforce operating across markets such as Zimbabwe. “Over 50 percent of those are run by women,” she said.

According to the Joint SDG Fund, Zimbabwe’s Renewable Energy Fund is being scaled into a roughly $100 million second phase to mobilize larger clean-energy investment in Zimbabwe and the wider region.

Building on an initial $30 million fund managed with Old Mutual, the platform targets hundreds of enterprises — including women-led and youth-led firms — across solar, hydro, biomass and mini-grids to close energy access gaps and crowd in additional capital.

“So what we’re trying to do as we go through the clean energy transition — transitioning from fossil fuels to solar, to wind, to hydro, eventually hydrogen — we want to really make sure women are at the forefront,” Kurbiel said.

“I think it’s critical that we have women in engineering, that we have women in the STEM fields,” she said. “The future of so much of that science … really does require us to be in the laboratories as well as in the boardrooms.”

SDG 7 refers to affordable and clean energy, expanding access to reliable, modern, sustainable power, while SDG 5 refers to gender equality, ensuring women’s full participation and leadership.