Meet 6 Women Shaping our Climate’s Future

About

At P4G, supporting women climate entrepreneurs is not a checkbox — it is central for stronger, more resilient climate solutions. Eighty seven percent of the climate startups P4G supports, align with the 2X Global Challenge criteria on gender equity finance, advancing women’s leadership, employment, ownership and access through their business models. 

Across our startup portfolio, women climate entrepreneurs are not waiting for the perfect conditions. They are responding to lived realities — plastic-choked cities, failing honey harvests, unstable aquaculture systems, energy poverty and refrigeration gaps that threaten food, economic and health security.

On this International Women’s Day, we are spotlighting their leadership. We asked six of our women startup founders to reflect on what drives them, what shapes their leadership, what barriers persist and what must change: 

• Carol Ofafa, CEO and Founder, E-Safiri
• Diana Paola Camacho, Chief Development Officer and Co-founder, Nanofreeze
• Etse-Hiwot Girma, CEO and Founder, Maritu Api-Products
• Hanh Do, CEO and Co-founder, BUYO Solutions Company Limited
• Isabel Pulido Espinosa, CEO and Co-founder, Nanofreeze
• Roikhanatun Nafi’ah, CEO and Founder, Crustea

Is There a Personal Moment or Experience That First Made Climate Action Feel Urgent to You—Not Just Important? 

For Hanh Do, the moment came during the COVID-19 lockdown in Vietnam. Confined at home, she watched the plastic packaging from food deliveries accumulate.

“As a society and community, we consumed too much plastic packaging and discarded too much waste to the environment,” she reflects. That realization became a calling. She founded BUYO to eliminate plastic waste — transforming frustration into systemic change.

BUYO aims to address Vietnam's rising plastic consumption and food waste challenges. By upcycling discarded biowaste, such as brewery spent grains, BUYO delivers scalable, low-carbon materials that can be used to make a variety of consumer products like straws, plates and cups. The materials biodegrade within a year, proving waste can power a more circular future.

For Roikhanatun Nafi’ah, climate urgency wasn’t theoretical. In Indonesian aquaculture communities, climate shocks don’t appear as abstract risks — they show up as failed harvests and lost income. Extreme weather, unstable water quality and disease outbreaks translate into families losing their primary source of livelihood.

She founded Crustea, a startup that provides solar-powered Eco-Aerators, a device that helps maintain optimal water quality and oxygen levels necessary for healthy shrimp farms. Combined with their IoT monitoring system, Crustea reduces energy consumption by up to 80% and helps farmers manage water quality at lower costs while adopting eco-friendly practices.

“If we don’t build more resilient systems now,” she says, “we’re asking communities to absorb the consequences alone.”

In Kenya, Carol Ofafa saw how fossil fuel dependence quietly shaped daily life — long commutes, rising fuel costs, polluted air and hidden health burdens. Climate change wasn’t a distant future; it was already affecting people’s wallets, health and dignity.

“I wanted to work on solutions that reduced emissions and improved everyday life for women like my mother and grandmother,” she explains — women who walked hours daily to access basic services.

To ensure that these communities were included in the clean energy transition, she founded E-Safiri, a startup expanding charging stations and battery swapping points in peri-urban and rural areas to increase electric mobility adoption. 

Through a structured joint venture with Kiri EV under the name Sun Run, the startups signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Awuoth Widows and Orphans Community Based Organization to offer EV and cold storage solutions to fish vendors, facilitating efficient transport and storage, and providing more opportunities for local women to be business owners.

For Etse-Hiwot Girma, the shift happened in Ethiopia’s drylands where she worked. She watched beekeepers lose entire honey seasons — not because of poor management, but because rainfall patterns shifted and flowering cycles broke. There were no disaster headlines, just families earning less each year and being told this was ‘normal’. 

“What troubled me most was the quiet resignation,” she says. “When hardship becomes routine, urgency disappears. I recall speaking with one of our female beekeepers who experienced a drastic drop in honey harvested and she was just tired, no one prepared her for the changing climate.”

Climate change became clear: not a future risk, but a present economic shock disproportionately punishing those least responsible. Este-Hiwot founded Maritu Api-Products to create an integrated honey supply chain focused on promoting sustainable beekeeping practices, implementing end-to-end traceability, and advancing smart hive management through technological innovations including AI-powered data analysis. 

For Isabel Pulido Espinosa, the turning point came from self-reflection. Living in Spain as a software designer, she felt disconnected and complicit in consumption habits contributing to waste. This discomfort pushed her to return to Colombia to finish her business degree. In her final year, she noticed something that changed everything: her classmates in business school were building climate-focused ventures, while friends in design were exploring bio-design, using biology and nanotechnology to solve some of humanity’s biggest challenges. She immersed herself in bio-design and food preservation research. At the intersection of those paths, NanoFreeze was born — transforming curiosity into impact.

Her co-founder, Diana Paola Camacho, described it as more than a single moment. It was a steady drumbeat of warning signs: fires, floods, landslides. The effects of global warming as an immediate reality pushed her from helplessness to action. 

“Reacting was not enough,” she says. “We had to think big.”

Together, they reimagined refrigeration — developing a technological innovation that could slow climate collapse and leave a more sustainable world for future generations.

NanoFreeze’s patent pending bio-nanotechnology Cold Coats and Natural Freezers are natural refrigeration alternatives that preserve perishable goods, reducing energy consumption by 44% and lowering CO₂ emissions.

How Do Your Lived Experiences as a Woman Influence the Way You Approach Climate Solutions? 

Repeatedly, these founders return to one word: responsibility.

Hanh notes that women often think in generational terms — what will sustain the next 50 to 60 years, not just the next quarter. Patience and resilience are essential in climate tech, where transformation takes time.

Nafi’ah designs solutions grounded in daily realities — caregiving responsibilities, mobility constraints, safety, access to capital. Technical solutions fail if they ignore lived experience. Inclusion, she insists, must be built in from the start. That looks like systems that are practical to operate, training that is truly accessible, and business models that reduce risk for those with the least buffer. It also means leading with collaboration, “listening deeply to users and partners because climate solutions are stronger when communities co-create them rather than simply receive them,” she noted.

Carol approaches her work with sharp questions: Who benefits? Who is excluded? Who carries hidden costs? Growing up in rural and peri-urban Kenya, she saw women performing invisible labor to sustain communities. They were left out of decision-making roles and found their safety and economic opportunities continually deprioritized. Today, she builds systems that serve real people in real contexts — not abstract models.

For Etse-Hiwot, leadership means asking: Will this reduce risk? Will it work when resources are stretched? Will communities adopt it alongside indigenous knowledge? 

“This perspective comes from lived reality, balancing work, family, community and responsibility in the Ethiopian context,” she stated. “I see the same balancing act in the women we work with. These are formidable women who manage the scarcest of resources-water, food, income-with very little margin for error.”

Isabel speaks of energy poverty in rural Colombia, where the absence of cold refrigeration affects health, nutrition and dignity. She expresses how she has been shaped, by both experience and necessity, to think beyond herself — considering how everyday decisions ripple through families, communities and entire systems over time.

 “Through conversations and interviews with families in rural areas of Colombia, I came to deeply understand how energy poverty directly impacts health, nutrition and dignity. That reality made it clear to me that I needed to do something about it.”

What’s a Challenge You’ve Faced as a Woman Founder in the Climate Space That Isn’t Talked About Enough? 

While each founder operates in a different sector, a common theme emerges: the invisible burden of proof.

Hanh notes that climate tech demands both inspiration and deep technical skill — and women founders must master both while navigating domestic responsibilities.

Nafi’ah describes the “proof burden” — women asked to over-validate traction, governance and impact before being taken seriously. In technical rooms, assumptions about who the expert is persist.

Carol names structural bias directly. Even with strong solutions and measurable impact, skepticism lingers — particularly for African women in global climate markets. She says the exhaustion of constantly proving credibility is real and slows innovation for everyone.

Etse-Hiwot echoes this reality in Ethiopia’s conservative systems and nascent climate markets. Women must be both exceptional and agreeable — delivering results while softening authority.

Isabel describes being a young woman in a male-dominated refrigeration industry, where being heard requires more evidence, more persistence, more clarity. Bias often operates unconsciously, making awareness essential.

For Diana, the barrier is also ideological: the “sustainability taboo.” Green solutions are still treated as optional or experimental. As a woman leading a biotech company, she must serve as both technologist and educator — challenging entrenched industry paradigms.

What Would Gender-Responsive Climate Finance Actually Look Like?

While many of the founders echoed the same needs as most other startup founders, patient capital; smaller ticket sizes; and investment in enabling systems, they also brought up other factors for investors to consider. 

Nafi’ah sees it as alignment. Women-led enterprises (especially in food systems and climate adaptation) don’t scale overnight. Financing should follow real pilot-to-scale timelines. That means patient capital and milestone-based financing. And funding structures should recognize unpaid care burdens, ensuring women participate not just as beneficiaries, but as leaders across the value chain.

For Carol, it’s a shift in mindset: “it would treat women as leaders and co-creators of climate solutions, not as an afterthought or a box to tick.”

And Isabel reminds us that good intentions are not enough. Accountability matters. Without clear capital allocation targets, such as committing at least 50% of funding to women-led ventures, gender equity remains optional. Investment committees must also reflect diverse lived experiences. “Too often, women founders are asked to prove credibility repeatedly, while male peers are evaluated on potential,” she notes. A gender-responsive system corrects that imbalance and rewards resilience, impact and long-term value creation.

Gender-responsive finance, they argue, is not about checkboxes. It is about redesigning systems to reflect reality — enabling solutions to scale.

On This International Women’s Day, What’s One Message You Want Decision-Makers, Investors or Policymakers to Hear from Women Climate Entrepreneurs? 

The collective message is evident: Support women as leaders, not beneficiaries.

“Women climate entrepreneurs are not ‘nice to have’ for inclusion,” says Nafi’ah. “They are building essential infrastructure for resilience.”

“Trust women climate entrepreneurs and fund them at scale,” declares Isabel. “Equity is about speed, impact and results.”

Carol reminds investors: sidelining half the world’s talent is not just unfair — it’s inefficient.

Etse-Hiwot calls for climate solutions that are participatory and sustained, built with communities, not imported as one-time packages.

Hanh makes it personal: support women building a greener world — it’s the world your mother and daughter would want to see.

On this International Women’s Day, the question is no longer whether women belong at the center of climate innovation. They are already there.

The real question is whether finance, policy and power structures will finally catch up.

Acknowledgement

We extend our thanks to the inspiring women leaders who generously shared their experiences and insights for this feature. We are grateful for your leadership and for the work you continue to do to shape a more sustainable future.

About Our Leaders

Carol Ofafa is an award-winning electrical and electronics engineer and the Founder and CEO of E-Safiri, advancing renewable energy and sustainable mobility. A finalist for the 2025 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation and a SEforALL Energy Hero, she has also been recognized among Kenya’s Top 40 Under 40 women. She holds a First-Class degree from the University of Nairobi and an MSc with Leadership Recognition from the University of Glasgow. Learn more about E-Safiri.

Diana Paola Camacho is co-founder and Chief Development Officer of NanoFreeze, where she leads innovation strategy and organizational growth. A biodesign specialist, she is passionate about creating sustainable, science-driven solutions. She also oversees the company’s administrative structure to ensure long-term impact. Learn more about NanoFreeze.

Etse-Hiwot is the founder and CEO of Maritu Api-Products and a climate-smart entrepreneur focused on biodiversity restoration and women’s economic empowerment. She works at the intersection of sustainable enterprise and ecosystem building across East Africa. Her leadership advances inclusive, nature-based economic growth. Learn more about Maritu Api-Products.

Hanh Do is the CEO and co-founder of BUYO Solutions Company Limited, transforming bio-waste into sustainable materials. She previously held leadership roles at Esquel Group, Viet Capital Asset Management, and USAID Vietnam. Her experience spans global manufacturing, investment, and economic development. Learn more about BUYO Solutions Company Limited.

Isabel Pulido Espinosa is CEO and co-founder of NanoFreeze, a climate-tech startup pioneering bio-nanotechnology to improve energy efficiency in refrigeration and cold chains. Recognized by MIT Technology Review as one of the 35 Innovators Under 35, she has led the company’s expansion across Colombia and Mexico. Her work supports major food and industrial clients in decarbonizing cooling systems. Learn more about NanoFreeze.

Roikhanatun Nafi’ah is the founder and CEO of Crustea (PT Eco Karya Teknologi), a climate-tech startup advancing sustainable aquaculture. With a background in Industrial Engineering, she leads innovations in smart water monitoring, energy-efficient aeration, and AI-enabled farm solutions. Her work helps shrimp and fish farmers boost productivity while strengthening climate resilience. Learn more about Crustea.