Jennifer Buckley of Sweef Capital wins UN Women Award for Leadership Commitment to Gender Equality

We are thrilled to announce that Jennifer Buckley, Founder & Managing Director of Sweef Capital has been selected as the 2nd runner up in the Leadership Commitment category at the 2021 Regional Asia-Pacific Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) Awards ceremony. The award is a meaningful recognition of the works and progress made by Jennifer and the Sweef Capital team in pursuit of women’s economic empowerment through our impact investment mission and approach.

“Sweef Capital is a significant milestone of my work in private equity – a woman-led investment firm and is at the forefront to change the narrative on the lack of diversity in private equity and the wider alternatives investment industry. We live by gender diversity everyday as reflected in our ownership, leadership, workforce, policies and processes, the same principles we apply to our portfolio companies.”, shared Jennifer during the award ceremony.

About the award

The Leadership Commitment category recognized leaders in corporations who have been instrumental in setting strong corporate commitments inclusive of progressive policies, regulations or practices that aim to promote gender equality in the workplace, marketplace and/or community. This includes company leaders taking specific roles and responsibilities in promoting gender equality within the company and making public commitments or delivering gender sensitive messages to the public.

The WEPs (Women’s Empowerment Principles) is a joint initiative of UN Women and the UN Global Compact aimed at empowering women to participate fully in economic life across all sectors and outlines seven steps for businesses to achieve that in the workplace, marketplace and community. To date, more than 5,000 companies around the world are signatories to the , and the Asia-Pacific alone has a total of over 1,500 signatories registered.

For more information, please read the official press release about the UN Women 2021 Regional Asia-Pacific WEPs Awards ceremony published on the website of UN Women Asia and the Pacific.

About Jennifer Buckley

Jennifer Buckley is a private equity professional passionate about championing women’s economic empowerment through gender-focused funds, demonstrating that these investment strategies are able to generate market-rate financial returns while also delivering significant impact. The premise is that women-focused investing is vital to economic and societal development.

At Small Enterprise Assistance Funds (“SEAF”), Jennifer led the women’s economic empowerment initiatives and formed a team of predominantly women investment professionals and gender lens champions in Southeast Asia. She saw an opportunity to integrate the private equity model with the impact framework and tools to develop an investment product that will entice mainstream capital providers to adopt gender lens investing. Jennifer was instrumental in developing the Gender Equality Scorecard (GES©) and led the roll-out over SEAF’s 30 global offices and funds and its engagement within the impact investment and development finance community.

In June 2021, she marked another milestone in her career when she formed Sweef Capital Management Pte Ltd (formerly known as SEAF Southeast Asia Management Pte Ltd), to continue to build a strong regional base and exemplar for women-led funds management. Jennifer is currently in discussions with different institutions to secure more limited partners with the goal of building a US$100 MM fund for SWEEF.