Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation in collaboration with Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI), Agence Française de Développement (AFD), Green India Financial System (GIFS), and Greening of Finance by Women (GRoW), organised the Annual Theme Discussions Summit 2024, on ‘Strengthening Green Financing and Mainstreaming Gender’ on January 23, 2024, in Mumbai, Maharashtra. Mr Nitin Desai, Board member of Shakti, inaugurated the event and launched SIDBI’s book on financing e-mobility.
The GIFS Initiative, founded in December 2021 by Shakti, AFD, and SIDBI, is the first Indo-European platform promoting the greening of India’s financial system. It facilitates knowledge exchanges, training, and networking among finance practitioners from banks, investment funds, and financial institutions. With over 500 participants in events during 2022-2023, GIFS aims to shape discussions on greening the financial ecosystem and operationalise these ideas within Indian institutions. The initiative plans to reconvene the financial community to address recent developments in green finance and encourage collaboration for a resilient and low-carbon transition in India, emphasising the alignment of the financial system and MSMEs.
Shubhashis Dey, Director, Climate Policy & Climate Finance, Shakti participated in the session on ‘Lessons learnt of G20 Presidency for the Indian financial sector and perspective + COP28 messages and takeaways in Indian Context’ where he said, “MDBs have a critical role in mobilising finance for green projects in developing countries. They are expected to play an important role in reducing the risk of those projects so that private capital flows in. G20 Capital Adequacy Framework recommends measures like assigning more credit to callable capital, re-look credit rating mechanisms for MDBs investing in green projects in developing economies and adapting approaches to defining risk tolerance to help MDBs raise additional capital of USD 200 billion.”
Kruthika Jerome, Programme Manager, Climate Finance, Shakti, spoke on ‘Voices on GRoW by Women Entrepreneurs.’ During her talk, she emphasised, “GROW – Greening of Finance by Women is designed to interface around the gender-climate-finance nexus. GROW emphasises on increasing participation of women in green finance and increasing the number of women in leadership roles in green and climate finance. Over the last one year, GROW worked with women entrepreneurs to help scale their green business, an area predominantly dominated by male entrepreneurs.”