My Moral Compass: Cristina Ljungberg on Storytelling, Scalable Impact, and Investing in Women’s Health
Cristina Ljungberg is one of the rare impact investors that understands the critical role creative narrative can play in captivating a broader audience. “Film and storytelling have to be one of the most scalable tools available,” says Ljungberg who has helped to finance more than forty-five films, including the 2018 hit documentary about plant-based eating, The Game Changers. “I am shocked that more impact investors or philanthropists don’t understand that storytelling is so key.”
The intersection of creativity, scalability, and impact is where Ljungberg, an impact investor, film financier, and advocate for girls’ and women’s health, thrives. She understands there is rarely one straight line to a solution, but rather a myriad of paths that cross and overlap, reaching many people and building great awareness in the process. “I think it’s so important to be curious,” she says, “and to really go where other funders aren’t.”
These multitudes have played out over the course of Ljungberg’s career, all siphoning into her passion to embolden the wellbeing of girls and women across the globe. Eva Yazhari recently sat over Zoom with Ljungberg, who was home in Stockholm, to talk about it all: Ljungberg’s innovative funding collaborative The Case for Her, her work investing in overlooked and underfunded causes, and the need to look at goals through creative and strategic lenses. “For menstrual health, we could sit here and talk about the education piece, the product development piece, water and sanitation, but if we’re really going to have scalable impact it has to reach scale somehow it needs to be mainstreamed,” she says. “We need to all be talking about it and destigmatize it.”
A Conversation with Cristina Ljungberg
You have a fascinating background that includes degrees in biology, biotechnology, and business, as well as experience working in these fields. How has your career path informed your work that is focused on girls’ and women’s healthcare?
All of my studies have been firmly grounded in developing myself as a generalist rooted in science, technology, and business. I think that has naturally led to me being quite curious and very comfortable working at intersections or across silos. I think this background and some of my early professional experience, for instance, as an engineer and then a consultant developed me into a very focused problem solver who could speak multiple “languages.”
Healthcare has always been on my agenda. However, the challenges in women’s health come with all the types of challenges that I enjoy working on, as I mentioned above, hard complex problems at the intersections, across silos, and with little data.
You’re originally from Indiana, you’ve lived in Sweden for almost two decades, and your work has taken you across the globe. How has access to different cultures helped you see all the nuances in the needs for greater equity in health care, girls’ and women’s care, and female sexual wellness and pleasure?
Living in Sweden has really given me an opportunity to experience what access to universal healthcare for all means to society. Beyond just being a human right, in my opinion, knowing that everyone can access the care they need makes us all stronger. After having been here for about twenty years, I can reflect differently on my experiences in the US. I really believe that having these two very different experiences has informed how I think about health systems. Beyond that, when I’m further afield, I can really see the impact of a lack of access, period.
With regards to female sexual wellness and pleasure, it has been so heavily stigmatized, ignored and underfunded for so long. Now we are finally seeing something happen. New ideas and innovations are popping up and often in unexpected places.
Investing in women really is one of the greatest and most important opportunities for scalable impact. Even beyond being an opportunity, it is a necessity for achieving the SDGs and addressing climate change etc.
What led you to create The Case for Her? Would you walk us through the impetus of why you started the foundation and the work that you did there?
It’s one of life’s greatest privileges and pleasures to contribute to solving one of the world’s most challenging problems, especially one that I am passionate about.
The Case for Her was born out of a powerful collaboration of two like-minded philanthropists, myself and my co-founder Wendy Anderson. Pretty early on in our collaborative efforts, we realized that combining resources would be a highly effective strategy and a way to utilize our individual skills and resources as a method to maximize impact.
Wendy and I met, each having a family foundation that we were running. We decided to do some relatively small, early-stage funding of menstrual health—a sort of experiment of partnership and funder collaboration. It didn’t take long for us to realize that we wanted to scale up and exclusively work together. Not only did we enjoy it, but we also saw that we could share time, resources, and intel while also sharing our questions and concerns, and continuously inspiring each other.
Realizing that people were getting confused by two separate foundations working so closely together and that partnering was not reducing workload but creating more opportunity and impact, we decided to make it official and create The Case for Her. Not only that, we hired a small staff consisting of a managing director and a communications officer.
After four years, we have two philanthropic investment portfolios, the first focused on menstrual health and the second on sexual health and pleasure. These two portfolios are geographic and financing agnostic. We have invested and granted funding globally. We leverage the portfolios of research, innovation, education et cetera as strategic learning portfolios and advocate for more awareness, mainstreaming and funding into these key women’s health areas. It’s been an incredible journey and we are just getting started. In 2021, we have plans to grow the portfolios and the team.
You said earlier that you can see “the impact of a lack of access” can have. In terms of women’s health, what does this lack look like?
About 85 percent of women and girls globally don’t use a commercial menstrual product. That doesn’t necessarily mean lack of access; it could mean a personal choice. And it also doesn’t mean that the method they’re using isn’t appropriate, it just means that it’s not a commercial product.
One of the organizations that we’ve engaged within this space is Population Services International (PSI). We decided to focus our project with PSI on Nepal because we had an early understanding that this was going to be one of the most challenging environments to work in. We spent three years looking at menstrual health across a lot of different geographies, ethnicities, and religions in Nepal, and found that 90% percent of women and girls there practice something called menstrual restrictions. These restrictions include everything from not being able to touch a fruit tree, to not eating at the family table, to actually being required to spend your period living outside the family home. So what these restrictions really mean is that for a quarter of their menstruating life, these women and girls are losing access to education, nutritious food, religious practices, and family time.
It is easy to jump to the question of product access when it comes to menstruation, but the more important issue is really access to education and information about your own body. That is one of the things that continues to bubble up for us: How the importance of education and information about your own body really affects almost every aspect of a girl’s life.
How does being a film producer and financier weave into your work?
Menstrual health and documentary film are two of the most massively underfunded, key opportunities for scalable impact. Storytelling is one of those wonderful things that make us human. We are our stories. They are the thing that connects us. Listening to the stories and experiences of others are opportunities to develop, change, and connect. To find a common ground and to empathize with others.
When it comes to documentaries, it must be one of the only businesses where you complete the product before you're able to close the budget. It’s so incredibly high risk.
I have been funding and financing documentaries for almost ten years with a wonderful partner, Victoria Steventon. It’s been over forty-five films and we are also just getting started. Again, I find that partnership has unlocked so many opportunities for me and resulted in incredible learning and friendship.
Adequate and just menstrual health and reproductive health is a problem, particularly in many middle- and low-income countries, which you focus on. It is also an issue that is stigmatized even in high functioning, developed countries. In the US, for example, girls and women under the poverty level cannot get financial support to help them purchase menstrual care products. What are some of the main causes behind this?
Menstrual equity is a problem, but what we really lack is the research to show what the most effective solution would be. We are seeing governments earmarking millions of dollars to provide free menstrual pads, but we don’t know if that is the solution menstruators need, or even want. There is too much of a fixation on products as the solution when what is really needed is evidence to show what menstruators need and the impacts of the interventions that we have.
And lack of education is a big problem. In some places, young menstruators don’t know what is happening to them when they get their first period because the issue is so highly stigmatized that no one ever prepared them for what to expect and what to do.
In addition to the stigma around menstrual health, there are other global biases and challenges facing women that are also known, which include inequalities in the economic status, unpaid labor—the list continues. What are some things that are, perhaps, not as widely known but are critical to know?
There is a shameful gap when it comes to funding for female entrepreneurs. First, there are fewer female entrepreneurs, and compounding that is the fact that those female entrepreneurs in the space are held back by gender bias and stereotypes in the investment process. A recent report showed that 93 percent of all available capital in the Nordics in 2019 was picked up by all-male teams. We need to do better.
Morgan Stanley estimates that investors are missing out on businesses worth $4 trillion in revenue annually by not investing in more female- and minority-led enterprises.
What are some ways people can help advance the work that you do, and use their privilege to empower women in their communities and around the world?
Words are powerful and communication is essential. Being silent about issues like menstruation and female sexual health and pleasure only reinforces the idea that they are things we should be ashamed of and keep hidden. Being open about our own lived experience and curious about others is a significant and important part of breaking the stigmas and moving the needle. I bring my work home and take responsibility for raising the next generation to not hold the same stigmas that I was raised with and to be curious, especially amongst boys. Reaching scalable impact will be through mainstreaming key women’s health issues that affect us all.
I also believe that we need to be better customers. Women drive or influence more than 70 percent of all consumer spending, so let’s show investors what is important to us.
To learn more about Cristina Ljungberg and The Case for Her visit thecaseforher.com.
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