The World Is Going Orange: how a new class of bond is financing women's futures

This article was written by Elena Askew-Renaut, a second-year Politics & Philosophy student at the LSE and Head of Communications for the Website & Blog of the LSESU Pro Bono Division of the Law Society.

On 13 November 2025, Ella Rees, associate in the Derivatives and Structured Finance practice at A&O Shearman, visited LSE to speak to the Law Society's Pro Bono Division. This event was organised by the Awareness team of the Pro Bono Division, led by Natalie Cheung. What began as a speaker event became the basis for something larger: a window into one of the most quietly consequential experiments at the crossroads of law, finance, and gender equality. This article attempts to do justice (pun intended) to both.

Ella Rees graduated in 2020 into a pandemic. Like many law students that year, the path she had mapped quietly dissolved. She ended up volunteering in northern France, helping connect asylum seekers with legal aid lawyers, acting as support between frightened clients and their attorneys in a system that can seem designed to confuse. It was, she told her LSE audience, the experience that cemented her commitment to pro bono. She wondered, briefly, whether to abandon corporate law entirely for human rights practice. She didn't. Instead, she found a way to do both.

That resolution is more interesting than it sounds. Rees works in derivatives and structured finance, a corner of the law that tends to feel remote from the lives of the people it might affect. The instruments it produces, special purpose vehicles and cross-border securities and blended capital architectures, are not the stuff of legal aid clinics. And yet one of the transactions her team works on pro bono is, she argues, genuinely transformative for the women it reaches. It is called the Women's Livelihood Bond series. And it has, without much fanfare in the mainstream press, become one of the most innovative instruments in sustainable finance.

"Orange" and why the colour matters

To understand the Women's Livelihood Bond, it helps to understand where it sits within the family of so-called "thematic bonds", instruments that have reshaped sustainable finance over the past decade. Green bonds channel capital toward climate and environmental projects; they now constitute a market worth over $650 billion annually. Blue bonds, a smaller category, target marine conservation. Each colour is shorthand for a covenant: proceeds raised must be spent in accordance with the bond's stated purpose, verified by external reviewers. Orange bonds (named for the colour of UN Sustainable Development Goal 5, gender equality) are the newest and most explicitly targeted member of this family. Launched formally on International Women's Day 2022 by the Singapore-based Impact Investment Exchange (IIX), the Orange Bond Principles require that issuers direct capital toward gender-positive goals, maintain meaningful gender diversity within their own teams, and submit to rigorous, externally verified impact reporting. Unlike a broad ESG fund, where "gender" might mean having a certain percentage of women on a corporate board, an orange bond demands that its proceeds reach women directly - in their livelihoods, their financial resilience, their access to clean energy and affordable housing. It is precisely the kind of instrument, Rees suggested at LSE, where the technical expertise of a structured finance lawyer has something real to offer, not in spite of its complexity, but because of it.

From Wall Street to a social stock exchange

The architect of the orange bond framework is Durreen Shahnaz, a Bangladeshi-American who was the first Bangladeshi woman to work at Morgan Stanley and the first to attend the Wharton School of Business. After years in finance, she walked away, spending time at Grameen Bank, launching an e-commerce startup, and eventually arriving at the National University of Singapore, where she began asking a deceptively simple question: why couldn't the machinery of capital markets be pointed at the world's most underserved communities? In 2009, with seed funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, she founded IIX and built what she describes as the world's first social stock exchange. The platform has since mobilised nearly $500 million in private-sector capital across 60 countries, claiming to have positively impacted over 160 million lives. Shahnaz, a recipient of the 2017 Oslo Business for Peace Award (often called the Nobel Prize for business ethics) puts the mission plainly: she will not stop innovating finance until the world recognises investing in women as the greatest untapped economic and social accelerator of our time. The Women's Livelihood Bond series, which began in 2017, is her most durable proof of concept.

7 Bonds, 8 Years, 0 Defaults

The first issuance, WLB1, raised a modest $8.5 million and was listed on the Singapore Exchange, the world's first gender-lens security to achieve a public listing. It carried a 5.65% annual coupon over four years. Proceeds flowed to microfinance institutions, clean energy providers, affordable housing lenders, and sustainable agriculture enterprises across Cambodia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam - each contractually bound to use the capital to support women's income generation and financial resilience. When WLB1 matured in July 2021, every investor had been repaid in full and every social performance target had been met or exceeded, including through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The series has since grown to seven issuances totalling $288 million, and the record holds: not a single credit default across the entire portfolio. WLB5, closed in December 2022, became the world's first formally designated Orange Bond. WLB6, at $100 million, was the largest. The seventh tranche, launched in July 2025, raised $60 million in its first close (oversubscribed) drawing the International Finance Corporation (the World Bank's private-sector arm) as a first-time investor, committing $14.5 million. Sweden's Sida provided a 40% portfolio guarantee. Returning investors include Nuveen, APG investing on behalf of ABP (one of the world's largest pension funds) and the Ford Foundation. Across the series, IIX estimates that over 3.37 million women and girls have been directly reached. One Cambodian borrower reported a 20% increase in harvest yield following climate-smart farming training funded through WLB proceeds. The bond framework uses a proprietary digital tool (IIX Values) to collect impact data directly from women beneficiaries and report semi-annually to investors. These numbers matter because they answer the skeptic's first question: does it work financially? The answer, across eight years, appears to be yes.

The Legal Architecture and the Pro Bono Case

This is where Rees's story and the WLB's story converge most directly, and where the pro bono dimension becomes something more than a footnote. A&O Shearman, whose predecessor firm Shearman & Sterling was involved from the outset, has served as pro bono legal counsel to IIX on the WLB series since 2017, contributing hundreds of hours of specialist work at no cost. The firm's team handles the structural complexity that makes these deals possible: cross-border securities documentation, regulatory compliance across multiple jurisdictions, and the blended-capital architecture of special purpose vehicles, first-loss tranches, and partial sovereign guarantees. Each bond must navigate Singapore Exchange listing requirements, ICMA Social Bond Standards, ASEAN Social Bond Standards, and where relevant, EU and UK securitisation regulations - simultaneously, across markets with divergent disclosure rules, currency regimes, and enforcement mechanisms. When Shearman & Sterling first took on the engagement, partner Kyungwon Lee described it as "a fantastic example of how capital markets lawyers can provide meaningful pro bono assistance to underserved communities in Asia." What made the arrangement distinctive then still makes it distinctive now: it is not immigration law or housing advice (the more familiar terrain of law firm pro bono) but highly specialised structured finance work that most organisations could not otherwise afford. Rees made this point with some care at LSE. Derivatives is a niche area, she noted; opportunities to apply that expertise in a socially meaningful way are rare. The WLB is, in that sense, a genuine fit: a transaction where technical knowledge that would otherwise serve only commercial clients can be directed toward something with a measurably different kind of outcome. She also noted that A&O Shearman counts pro bono hours toward billable targets, making sustained engagement practically viable alongside a demanding transactional practice. Beyond the WLB, the bulk of Rees's pro bono work is in the refugee and immigration space: advising asylum seekers on bail rights in immigration detention, and working on the firm's Afghan family reunion project. These commitments, she told her audience, reflect a deliberate choice rather than a compromise. The question of whether it is possible to find genuine meaning in a corporate legal career, she suggested, is answered more by what you do with the margins of that career than by the career itself.

A growing market, and a genuine question

The broader gender-lens investing market has reached at least $122 billion in total assets as of early 2025. The 2X Challenge (a G7-backed initiative) has mobilised $33.6 billion through development finance institutions. Root Capital's analysis of over $1 billion in loans found that women-led businesses had a 4.12 percentage point lower default rate than their male-led counterparts. McKinsey estimates that closing the global gender gap could add $28 trillion to global GDP. And yet the financing gap persists. The deficit in lending to women-led small and medium enterprises globally exceeds $300 billion. The UN estimates an additional $360 billion per year is needed just to achieve the gender equality goals already agreed upon. At current rates, the World Economic Forum projects it will take over 135 years to close the global gender gap entirely.

The risk in this space (and it is a real one) is "gender washing": labelling investments as gender-focused without delivering genuine impact, mirroring the greenwashing controversies that have dogged sustainable finance. Shahnaz has acknowledged the vulnerability directly. Critics, including the Association for Women's Rights in Development, have argued that many gender-lens frameworks focus on the numerical presence of women without giving them meaningful agency in how capital is deployed. Bond frameworks genuinely targeting gender inequality remain relatively rare even among social and sustainability bonds listed on ICMA's database. The WLB's defence against this charge lies in its design: verified impact data, direct beneficiary reporting, contractual restrictions on how proceeds are spent, and a repayment record now spanning nearly a decade. The Orange Bond Principles, certified by Sustainable Fitch and harmonised with ICMA standards, are designed to make that transparency replicable at scale. ITOCHU Corporation in Japan issued the country's first Orange Bond in late 2025. Indonesia's PT Permodalan Nasional Madani has issued the world's largest, at roughly $980 million. IIX has announced a $5 billion Orange Capital Markets plan for Indonesia by 2030. UNDP and IIX have signed an agreement targeting a $1 billion programme in Bangladesh.

What the event left behind

Ella Rees came to LSE on a November afternoon to talk about bonds and pro bono hours and the mechanics of loan agreements, but the conversation that emerged was about something broader: whether legal expertise concentrated in large commercial firms can be redirected toward the people who most need it. She also raised a harder question that she did not entirely resolve: whether the instinct of large firms to fill the gaps left by legal aid cuts risks letting governments off the hook for cutting that funding in the first place. These are not peripheral questions for a pro bono blog. They are its central ones. The Women's Livelihood Bond is, among other things, one answer to them - an attempt to make the law's most technical instruments do something that reaches all the way to a farmer in Cambodia or a micro-entrepreneur in Jakarta. Its record of eight years, seven issuances, $288 million mobilised, and zero defaults does not resolve the broader debate about what corporate law firms owe society. But it complicates easy cynicism about whether that debt can ever meaningfully be repaid. And for a law student still working out what kind of lawyer to become, that complication is perhaps the most useful thing a speaker can leave behind.

Photographed (Left to Right): Natalie Cheung (Head of Awareness), Ella Rees (Associate at A&O Shearman) , Arth Gupta (Awareness Officer), Ellyse Wong (Awareness Officer)