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Grace Mwangi
I spent four years at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., working on climate finance in the Africa region. My job was to evaluate and structure loans for renewable energy projects: solar installations in Kenya, wind farms in South Africa, mini-grid systems in rural Tanzania. The work was meaningful and slow. A typical project took 18-24 months from concept to first disbursement. The bureaucracy was staggering. The impact was real but incremental.
I left the World Bank for McKinsey in 2019, joining their Sustainability practice. The transition from a multilateral development institution to a management consultancy was culture shock. At the World Bank, we measured impact in lives improved and tons of CO2 avoided. At McKinsey, we measured it in client revenue and engagement extensions. Both frameworks are incomplete.
At McKinsey, I worked with Fortune 500 companies on ESG strategy, which is the polite way of saying I helped large corporations figure out what to say about sustainability without committing to anything that would hurt their quarterly earnings. I'm being uncharitable. Some clients were genuinely trying to decarbonize their operations and needed help building credible roadmaps. Others wanted a sustainability report that would keep activists quiet and their ESG ratings high. The frustrating part was that both types of clients looked the same from the outside.
The experience that radicalized me was working on a net-zero commitment for a major oil company. We built beautiful models showing how they could reach net-zero by 2050 through a combination of operational efficiency, carbon capture, and offset purchases. The models were technically correct. They were also, I believed, functionally meaningless, because they relied on assumptions about carbon capture technology that doesn't exist at scale and offset markets that don't work as advertised. I raised this concern. It was noted. The engagement continued.
I left McKinsey in 2023 and started writing about the gap between corporate sustainability rhetoric and reality. My first piece was called "The Net-Zero Industrial Complex," and it detailed how consulting firms, ratings agencies, and offset providers have created a $40B+ ecosystem around corporate sustainability that optimizes for the appearance of progress rather than actual emissions reductions. It made me very popular at dinner parties and very unpopular with my former employer.
My writing for Signal covers climate finance, ESG metrics, carbon markets, and the business case (or lack thereof) for corporate sustainability. I'm not anti-ESG. I'm anti-bullshit. The climate crisis is real, the need for corporate action is urgent, and the current framework for measuring and incentivizing that action is broken. I want to write about what would actually work.
I'm based in Nairobi, Kenya, where I grew up. I moved back after McKinsey because I wanted to be closer to the climate adaptation challenges that matter most to me personally. I advise a few climate-tech startups, I serve on the board of a Kenyan conservation nonprofit, and I run ultramarathons on trails in the Aberdare Range. The sunrises are worth the early alarm.
Experience
- Engagement Manager, McKinsey (Sustainability)
- Climate Finance Analyst, World Bank
- MPP, Harvard Kennedy School