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A savvy “adventure capitalist” is gearing up to raise $5 million for a pilot project, the Green Jobs Machine.

Sharron McPherson is adamant. “This is not a glamour story. This is a story of a person who believes that she is on this planet to do some things.” She is raw — kinetic and candid in conversation when she builds to her point. Yet refined — tempering her passion with the delivery of advice, truth, and inspiring turns of phrase that can only come from a very unique life experience.

“My spiritual competence is really important for me,” Sharron continued. “And, as a result of me feeling like I've been called to do these things, it enables me to tap into a synchronicity that attracts the right resources and constellations of people.”

The “things” to which Sharron humbly refers are in fact major endeavors. Over the past 25-plus years, she’s raised over $1 billion for investments in sub-Saharan Africa and has impacted over 1.5 million people via creation of wealth and sustainable jobs. An “adventure capitalist” whose primary areas of investment are green infrastructure, renewable energy, and food security, Sharron helped architect the first infrastructure fund in Africa that was backed in 1998 by OPIC (now the US International Development Finance Corporation [DFC]). She is also co-founder of Women in Infrastructure Development & Energy (WINDE), one of Africa’s largest women’s infrastructure investment firms.

Now she’s bringing her expertise and vibe to the US with the Green Jobs Machine, a spin-off of WISE (Women in Sustainable Energy & Infrastructure PBC). The timing is perfect, as Sharron has recently served as an international foreign policy advisor helping to ensure that the pending infrastructure legislation incorporates some of the lessons we’ve learned from US development finance agencies such as USAID and DFC.

“It’s been decades since we’ve engaged in a serious discussion about infrastructure investment here in the US,” she said. “Now it is [serious], along with much more present concerns about environmental justice. Gone are the days when you could build a pipeline through the middle of a community or destroy a cemetery without anyone noticing.”

It wasn’t clear early on in Sharron’s career that infrastructure would be part of her passion and purpose. However, her interest in finance was quite evident — and from a very young age. “I was a banker when I was about 6. I would save all my money and lend it to my siblings. I did charge interest. And if you did not pay me back, it was a problem,” laughed Sharron, who grew up in Norfolk, Va. in the 1960s and 70s. “I’m the youngest of eight; my father was a preacher, my grandfather was a preacher. My mother was a teacher and a nurse. When I look back, I can see that we were actually not very well-off financially. But we had love and a lot of people around all of the time.”

After graduating from the College of William & Mary with a B.S. in Economics, it was off to Wall Street. She soon decided on Columbia University School of Law because she wanted to more intimately understand the complex financial transactions in which she had been involved. When she graduated, Sharron returned to Wall Street as an investment attorney, and her clients were the big banks she had once worked for.

“We [Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton] did literally the largest mortgage-backed securitization in the history of Wall Street. It was $5 billion. This was around 1996 and it was insane. I remember being an associate at this firm with all these people working for me, and I was going to be a partner.”

Pressure was mounting and her lifestyle was twisting into something counter to her core. “There were many nights when I worked on Wall Street that I went home and I cried myself to sleep. I battled depression. I couldn't fit into any clothes because I was just drinking Diet Coke, 24 hours a day,” she shared. “I didn't know who my daughter was. I didn't have any friends because I didn't have time for them. I worked on my birthday. I worked on my daughter's birthday. I worked on Christmas.

“They called me ‘the bitch.’ I was hospitalized for chronic fatigue...And I just remember saying, ‘How many times can you sell a mortgage loan before this just becomes a house of straw?’ But you had all these folks who were involved and the rating agencies — everyone was riding that gravy train. I quit.”

Divorced and ready for the next chapter in 1997-98, Sharron moved with her daughter to South Africa on an offer to serve as a volunteer researcher for the South African Constitutional Court. This led to an opportunity to clerk for Justice Albert “Albie” Sachs, a South African activist, lawyer, writer and a former judge appointed by Nelson Mandela to serve on the first Constitutional Court of South Africa.

Sharron McPherson is co-founder of Women in Infrastructure Development & Energy (WINDE), one of Africa’s largest women’s infrastructure investment firms.

All of these transitions ultimately led to a very soulful manifestation of Sharron’s talents. As the years passed, Sharron found her greatest calling at the forefront of a movement to invest differently in African women and youth. Her legal and financial acumen served her well as she metamorphosed into a serial social impact entrepreneur, advocating for alternatives to corporate and traditional systems that are failing to equip people with the knowledge and skills needed to thrive in the age of disruption. WINDE, as an example, was one of the first companies in Africa to deploy blended capital and social impact investment solutions within an infrastructure investment space.

“Quite often we are averse to talking about power, but I define power as the capacity to impact with purpose. For me, most of my life has been about cutting through the forest, clearing something, planting something, watering that thing with my sweat, blood, and tears. I’m passionate about infrastructure because it is the foundation of our built environment which, in turn, shapes our daily lives.

“Most people go about their lives not knowing or caring how the built environment informs how they feel or interact. The built environment can either free people to reach their human potential, or it can bake in historical patterns of oppression and injustice. I believe infrastructure has an important role to play here. I am after all not just an infrastructure investor. I am unashamedly also an economic activist. I think we’re all better off when people are free and empowered to be the best that they can be.”

We’re fortunate to have Sharron back on US soil. Commute times are ever eating into family and personal time. According to the US Census Bureau, the average one-way commute increased to a new high of 27.6 minutes in 2019. The increase between 2006 and 2019 represents an increase of about 10 percent over 14 years. And public transit is so often inconvenient or difficult to access (and in many parts of the country, expensive!). Electric cars are tens of thousands of dollars, power grids are strained, aquifers are drying up. And many who choose bikes as their form of transportation take their lives in their hands. No doubt — our infrastructure isn’t working. It isn’t serving enough people.

“The solution is using advancing technology and coupling it with human ingenuity and passion and the right business strategy. That’s us [the Green Jobs Machine],” said Sharron. “We’ve done it before in really difficult places and now we’re doing it in the US.” Sharron and her team of enterprise development experts, behavior tech specialists, and AI gurus are gearing up to raise $5 million for the pilot, scheduled to launch in the second quarter of 2022. “We have come together to do good, make good money and — with hope — make life better for a lot of folks.”

Sharron is not on the planet to do “some things.” She is here to empower many to help themselves and the generations to come. *

A Deeper Dive With Sharron

1. What will bring true sustainability to US infrastructure?
   I believe that the first action we should take in the US is to rationalize the public private partnership (PPP) framework. When we add the complexity of state and local governments to how PPPs are structured in the US, much time is wasted trying to navigate red tape. The second action would be to reimagine the regulatory framework that governs small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Most small businesses stay small because if they grow, they lose governmental support. We need these businesses to grow! We need people who really understand how businesses operate in order to make good policy. Too often, that is not the case.

2. Where do you see women having the most impact in infrastructure?
   I see women as playing a critical role across the entire value chain of infrastructure; from conceptualization, through design and implementation, right through to how we operate and maintain. For example, WINDE’s involvement in one of the largest mixed use infrastructure for property development projects in Africa meant a child could run longer without having to cross a road. WINDE women insisted a waste-to-energy project was included. You could grow fruit and vegetables on the roof and sell this organic produce at a multi-purpose park. The bottom line was that we were able to charge tenants more, and the units for sale commanded a higher price as a result of this green initiative introduced by WINDE women. This is a real life example of how being more inclusive leads to being more sustainable.

3. What is most misunderstood about sustainability?
   First, that it’s not commercially viable; and second, that we’re going to achieve sustainability without being more inclusive. Real sustainability means we’re able to maximize how we construct and consume our built environment today and tomorrow. We cannot maximize our capacity to impact with half of our team on the bench. That means we have to include women and people from marginalized communities. Keep in mind also that it’s these people who are in the closest proximity to climate change precisely because of environmental degradation relating to infrastructure development. If sustainability doesn’t start there, then we’ve missed the point of sustainability completely.

4. Give us more details about the Green Jobs Machine.
   The Green Jobs Machine is a new tech start-up. In a nutshell, we’re enabling the enterprise development process with Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence. Why? Because it takes years and approximately $30,000 to create ONE green job here in the US. We’re not reinventing the enterprise development process. We are however leveraging advancing tech to (1) make it more affordable; (2) reduce the time it takes; (3) scale the effort in ways that you could not with tech enablement; and (4) do so in a way that is commercially sustainable.

   Green jobs creation is at the center of the infrastructure bill pending before the House. But how do we create these jobs? Who is going to create these jobs? These marginalized communities of people most impacted by infrastructure projects are difficult to access. People there do not trust the government. They do not trust big business. If we are going to Build Back Better, we are going to need to get enterprise development and new venture creation right in these communities.

5. Describe the importance of social investing. What is it and how does it impact change?
   Social impact investing is critical to the idea of sustainable and inclusive infrastructure development. Without it, we run cost/benefit analyses on infrastructure projects in certain communities and because of the value that we attribute to the lives in those communities, we invest in ways that have a long term deleterious impact on certain communities. What we’re beginning to realize is that if we want to seriously combat climate change, we’re going to need to invest differently in these communities. Without social impact investing, infrastructure projects as we know them today will take much longer to become truly sustainable.