Daniela Gheorghe
Global Lead and Principal: Climate Adaptation & Resilience Finance
Daniela is the Global Lead and Principal: Climate Adaptation & Resilience Finance in the Climate and Financial Service Strategy Practice at Genesis. She is a climate finance specialist and three-time impact entrepreneur with over 18 years’ experience across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Europe. Her work bridges private capital with market-led resilience solutions in emerging markets.
Daniela specialises in mobilising concessional capital, climate investment strategy, and the design of innovative financing instruments, catalytic capital structures, and inclusive financial products required to unlock private finance for vulnerable communities facing severe climate risks.
Her focus spans impact investing, climate risk assessment, MSME resilience lending, and market-led adaptation solutions across emerging markets. Most recently, at the Global Center on Adaptation, she has supported commercial banks, guarantee companies, and asset managers across Africa to understand and assess climate risk, showcase bankable adaptation solutions, and develop climate adaptation investment strategies and resilience-linked financial products for MSMEs and early-stage enterprises.
Other significant projects include co-developing an MSME solar lending product in India, and co-building a pioneering holding company that raised blended finance to strengthen smallholder farmer climate resilience in East Africa.
Across her career, Daniela has managed early-stage capital pools, built joint-ventures and venture-backed business models, and structured impact finance initiatives for a diverse range of public and private sector actors, including impact investors, foundations, and commercial banks such as Acumen, Antler Africa, Shell Foundation, Small Foundation, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, the Global Center on Adaptation, CRDB Bank, the Tanzania Agricultural Development Bank, and Dhaman Guarantee Company.
Daniela holds an MBA in Strategy and Finance from the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, where she was awarded a Skoll Scholarship, and a Bachelor’s degree in Communications and Public Relations from the National School for Political and Administrative Studies in Romania.
