Gender-based violence affects more than 1 in 3 women worldwide and has deep and lasting impacts across our families, communities, and the economy. From #MeToo and #TimesUp to the March4Justice, this moment has highlighted like never before the need for action and responsibility across all political, legal, and economic structures to deliver justice and safety. That includes our financial systems. Against this backdrop, Criterion has made a long-term commitment to demonstrating that finance can be used to address gender-based violence.
The Goal: Social change organizations, governments, and investors design and implement strategies that effectively use finance to reduce gender-based violence.
This focus on a single issue area, albeit one with complex intersections with other issues, enables us to go deep in a content area and model new interventions.
The depth enhances the impact potential, while uncovering a broad set of insights that capture the imagination of the whole movement. Decades of field building has taught us that we create systems change more effectively not by focusing on a small set of wins, but by opening a wide range of possibilities that invite people to imagine what they can create.
The structure is straightforward:
1) Engage asset holders in an advocacy campaign to challenge their investment managers to align their portfolios with an intention to prevent gender-based violence; and
2) partner with gender-based violence organizations to determine where systems of finance have the greatest potential to play a role in preventing and responding to gender-based violence.
We see a future where the power of the financial system, as standard practice, complements and support other strategies to prevent, reduce, and ultimately end gender-based violence.
When Criterion began exploring the relationship between finance and gender-based violence, the idea that violence could be material to investment decision-making was far from established. GBV appeared sporadically in research and convenings, but was rarely operationalized by investors or treated as a systemic financial risk.
This early phase focused on naming what was possible rather than producing finished tools. Initial momentum came through relationships with faith-based and philanthropic actors, including InFaith Community Foundation, where early donor leadership prompted a fundamental question: could investment strategies rather than only grant-making be intentionally designed to reduce violence? This question led to one of the first GBV-aligned investment portfolios in the United States, developed with partners such as Veris Wealth Partners, demonstrating that finance could be shaped around GBV even when metrics were still emerging.
During this time, Criterion also convened early cross-sector dialogues with investors, GBV experts, and intermediaries, including collaborations with Futures Without Violence and the Wharton Social Impact Initiative. These spaces tested whether GBV could be understood through financial concepts such as risk, governance, and materiality, and whether investors were willing to engage seriously with those ideas.
Workshops and trainings in Fiji with women’s rights organizations connected to Pacific RISE surfaced a critical insight that would shape everything that followed: GBV expertise, grounded in lived experience, is essential to credible financial analysis. This phase established legitimacy for GBV within finance and created the shared language that later tools would depend on.
As global attention to gender-based violence intensified following #MeToo and during the COVID-19 pandemic, Criterion’s work entered a new phase. Investors, governments, and development actors had moved beyond asking whether finance could engage GBV to explore how to do so responsibly, systematically, and at scale.
This period marked a deliberate shift from conceptual framing to practical demonstration. Criterion focused on developing the first generation of tools that investors could use in real decision-making contexts, including due-diligence guides, risk assessment methodologies, and investor roadmaps. Partnerships with governments and multilateral institutions including UNICEF, DFAT, USAID, and Global Affairs Canada accelerated this work, particularly in humanitarian, development, and fragile-context settings.
Collaboration with institutional investors, pension funds, and asset managers helped explore ways to embed GBV risk into broader investment analyses and market strategies, moving beyond a checklist approach to encourage more integrated consideration within financial decision-making.
Work with partners such as Christian Super, Tiedemann Advisors, and networks of faith-based investors translated GBV expertise into governance- and investment-committee-relevant questions.
Demonstrations across Australia, the Pacific, the United States, and parts of Africa showed that while political economies and market structures differ, the underlying patterns of GBV as a systemic risk are globally consistent. A central learning from this phase was the importance of translation: investors needed structured pathways to act, while GBV organizations needed safeguards and clarity to engage finance without reinforcing harm or unintended consequences.
By the end of this phase, GBV was increasingly recognized as a material financial risk, and Criterion’s tools and frameworks were being used by investors and public institutions to move from stated intent toward implementation. This work laid the institutional and relational foundation for the current focus on long-term infrastructure and systemic adoption.
Together, these phases transformed an emerging question into a recognized field of practice. Our focus today is building the infrastructure that enables action at scale. We are working alongside others to create the translation, decision-making, capital, and coordination systems that connect GBV expertise to financial practice so that prevention becomes embedded in how institutions assess risk, allocate capital, and shape markets over time.
Our work depends on an ever-expanding community of team members, advisors, donors, and other partners who help us achieve our mission.
