Growth, Resilience, Investment and Training (GRIT) is a six-year initiative funded by Global Affairs Canada to address the economic gap for women’s empowerment particularly in Northern Sri Lanka. The initiative includes local partners who are the leading incubators, accelerators, and network builders on the ground – Hatch, Lanka Impact Investing Network and Yarl IT Hub – to shift power structures in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and build out gender lens investing practices in Sri Lanka.

By investing in capacity building, knowledge exchange, marketing and partnerships, GRIT aims to achieve sustainable and scalable transformative change within Sri Lanka’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. As a Strategic Partner of the program, Criterion Institute provided field building and ecosystem mapping support, based on our methodology of Disrupting Fields. This paper draws on that framework to present an overview of what it means to build the gender lens investing ecosystem in the country with a focus on the power dynamics in the process – and how these dynamics can be disrupted.