At Village Capital, we’ve been heavily focused on how we can leverage our strengths to help reduce the damage the climate crisis is causing across the globe, and help communities adapt to the effects that are already affecting billions.

Who supports the supporters? It’s a question we’ve been thinking about for years at Village Capital. ESOs (incubators and accelerators) are often startups themselves.

We’re excited to welcome Reem Goussous, our new Chief Growth Officer at Village Capital. Reem will lead our growth-related activities across a range of products, services and geographies.

El Banco Mundial ha encontrado que las mujeres son dueñas de cerca del 30% de los negocios alrededor del mundo. Sin embargo, mucho menos del 30% del financiamiento para startups en etapas tempranas es destinado a negocios fundados por mujeres.

We love the spotlight that International Women’s Day puts on women around the globe who are breaking barriers, creating groundbreaking new innovations and shaping the future. And for us at Village Capital, we also think this day warrants reflecting once again on the fundamental math problem that exists in early stage investing.

2020 has been a year of change, adaptation, grief, reawakenings around social justice movements, anxiety, hope. It’s meant extended time connecting over screens, abandoning and recreating routines, and adapting prolonged uncertainty.

Congratulations to President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris on the outcome of the recent election. The historic turnout was validation that democracy works best when everyone participates – and I’m personally so delighted and inspired by the election of the first woman, Black woman and person of South Asian heritage as the Vice President of the United States.

At the beginning of this year, some VC investors celebrated “record” levels of investment for female-founded startups in the United States: 2.8%, up from 2% a year earlier.

A few years ago, my former colleague Ebony Pope wrote a blog about a Black entrepreneur who had an investor pull out of a potential investment. By way of explanation, the investor sent an email that included the line “If we see that the demographics of founders that give us the best return are white men in their late 20’s/early 30’s, you can expect the choice of management team who we invest in [to reflect that].”

Migrant workers are on the front line of the fight against coronavirus in Europe.

It would be an understatement to say that a lot has changed over the last month.

Last week, my colleagues Heather and Deepak attended the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) MENA Regional Summit in Dubai, where they took part in the unveiling of important new research from IFC, conducted in partnership with our team at Village Capital. The genesis of the research started with a well-known problem: the gender financing gap. Female-led startups in emerging markets raise only about $1 of seed funding for every $9 raised by all-male teams.