Skip to content

Team Member

Heidi Hafes

Business Director: Solutions for Women and Marginalised Groups

Heidi leads Shell Foundation’s DE&I strategy across the organisation and serves as a permanent member of our investment committee and is currently on parental leave.

As part of SF’s 2023-2027 strategy, Heidi transformed the level of our ambition and commitment to impact women and marginalised groups. She is now responsible for; building SF’s organisational capacity to deliver against our targets; embedding a DE&I lens into decision-making and processes; and building commercially viable solution that will enable millions of women and marginalised consumers to earn a living income.

Heidi has spent several years at SF building innovative and commercial solutions to improve the lives of low-income women across Africa and India. These include; pioneering ‘Business First Approach to Gender-Inclusion’; establishing the POWERED Programme in India; and partnering with investors to create new financial products and vehicles that incentivise better outcomes for women.  Her leadership on these topics has positioned SF as pioneers of ‘gender-inclusion’ in the distributed renewable energy sector.

Heidi was co-lead for the gender technical assistance working group for 2X global and is also a member of taskforce developing a go-to-market strategy for W+ Standard a ‘gender credit’. Previous to this role, Heidi held the role as Market Development Manager, and led our research and learning programme, where she supported the publication and dissemination of 50+ research and learning publications. She also led our in-country energy market building ‘accelerator programmes’ in Nigeria and Ethiopia and provided strategic marketing consultancy to CEO’s of SF’s portfolio.

Before joining Shell Foundation, Heidi worked in a wide range of business and marketing roles in commercial and not-for-profit organisations. Heidi graduated from the University in Kent with a degree in Law and has international business experience working in China, USA, across Africa and the Middle East.

For 25 years, Shell Foundation has partnered to scale clean energy solutions that boost incomes and cut emissions

Learn about our impact