ACT Gender and Livelihoods Thesis: Reshaping Investment Criteria
Developed an independent investment thesis that changed how ACT filtered and selected gender-focused investments.
Upasana Nallari
Associate/Fellow at ACT
From their time as
Associate/Fellow
ACT • 2024 - 2025
Overview
Upasana took on the gender and livelihoods thesis at a point where ACT had a broad gender investment mandate but no clear framework for how to act on it. The existing approach treated gender as a sector, which made it difficult to build a coherent portfolio.
The Story
Upasana took on the gender and livelihoods thesis at a point where ACT had a broad gender investment mandate but no clear framework for how to act on it. The existing approach treated gender as a sector, which made it difficult to build a coherent portfolio.
She started with first principles. She reviewed academic research and activist literature to identify the most powerful lever for women's empowerment, and the evidence pointed clearly to financial independence and stable economic opportunity as the primary driver of broader autonomy.
With that foundation, she mapped the approaches of gender-lens investors globally, studying how others had structured their theses and what kinds of organizations they had backed. She then built a mock portfolio of organizations working on gender in India to test whether the thesis would hold in practice.
The mock portfolio revealed a consistent pattern: the organizations with the strongest impact were those doing livelihoods-based work. This gave her the evidence she needed to finalize the thesis and present it internally.
The thesis changed ACT's investment criteria. The firm moved from a broad gender mandate to a specific filter: livelihoods-focused organizations where more than fifty percent of beneficiaries were women. The thesis gave the team a clear, actionable lens for evaluating deals.