Tracking COVID financing with a gender lens
We’ve been tracking emerging financing facilities and notice that to date, vehicles have been largely crisis-responsive and only a handful have an explicit gender lens - but gender consideration is critical to effective response, recovery and rebuilding post-pandemic.
By Sana Kapadia
The global pandemic has cracked open the plethora of underlying structural and social inequalities, and the resulting health, economic and financial shifts have yet to run their course. As we shelter in place and do our best to manage multiple responsibilities, it has been inspiring to witness incredible entrepreneurial solutions, responsive financial initiatives and other collaborative programmes emerging to mitigate these impacts as much as possible.
Relief versus recovery
We have been capturing emerging financing facilities with a gender lens, adding to broader initiatives like CovidCap. We’ve distinguished between those allocating capital for crisis relief and those focused on supporting recovery and longer term rebuilding. To date, vehicles have been largely crisis-responsive, given the immediate need for liquidity and working capital.
In addition and to the best of our knowledge, only a handful of vehicles announced to date are explicitly gender-smart or have a gender lens built in, or are focused on sectors where women are more disproportionately impacted by the crisis (e.g. healthcare, education). This echoes concerns we’ve heard in the community about the tendency to deprioritise lenses like gender and climate in the midst of a crisis. We are paying close attention to the framing and focus of each response, as we believe that now, more than ever, it is time to put gender on the table in investment decisions.
Here are four notable examples of gender-smart COVID initiatives:
Focused on the recovery of women owned and led SMEs in South East Asia, this facility has both an immediate response and relief tranche and a medium to longer-term recovery tranche
Built and off the ground in a matter of weeks with a rapid market assessment, this facility is in execution mode, acknowledging the immediate imperative to shore up women SME’s in the region
€5.2 billion of emergency funding for its non-EU operations, mostly to Africa to offer immediate support to the health sector and to provide liquidity to SMEs through local banks, with a portion of funding for women led ventures, to ensure they get much needed access to credit and related services and don’t get left behind
$10mn in immediate emergency relief to frontline charities delivering frontline health and food services, sectors that mostly comprise female workers and people of colour, and $200mn catalyse small and micro women-led businesses in emerging markets (more in the medium to longer term)
$15M commitment to advance economic and gender equity in Africa via two female-led funds: Alitheia IDF and Women’s World Banking Capital Partners II
Alitheia will initially invest between $1 and $5M in local currencies across Southern and Western Africa into SMEs in sectors including agribusinesses, consumer goods, and essential services, where women are disproportionately represented in the value and supply chain
Women’s World Banking will focus on financial inclusion, investing $10M into financial services companies in emerging markets.
Why gender finance matters now
There is abundant research around missing gender considerations in COVID response, whether in the language, framing or financing itself. This is compounded by existing gender inequalities - access to funding and support for female entrepreneurs, with other limitations by race, ethnicity and more. Moreover, in times of crisis, mainstream finance tends to revert to established and familiar approaches, posing a threat to budding gender-smart strategies. What is needed now in addition to crisis-responsive support, is more catalytic and supportive capital for women-led businesses that were underfunded before the crisis and face more acute financing gaps - as well as finance for those businesses providing products and services that improve the lives of women and girls.
This crisis is also an opportunity for the financial sector to identify remaining gaps in analysis, improve existing strategies, and to level up on gender data - focusing on gender outcomes and not outputs. As we think about the gender lens in these financing facilities at a strategic level, it is just as important to have a conversation around whether we are actually measuring what matters. It’s encouraging to see the considerable commitment towards deeper gender data considerations and a more nuanced response to the pandemic. This core framework and shared understanding of why and how gender is material could support the investing arena to become more resilient and risk-aware.
The reality is that gender can no longer be a side conversation if we really want to unlock capital at scale. Suzanne Biegel recently wrote about what it would take to 10X gender lens investing (Impact Alpha, subscription required): it is not only about 10x more capital but 10x more empathetic leadership, and 10x inclusion. Placing gender at the core of investments - while thinking of shareholders, customers, employees, and supply chains - we will be closer to creating the thriving, just, and equitable world we all know is possible.
Sana Kapadia (@sananomad) is GenderSmart’s Head of Content. Image credit: Martin Sanchez, Unsplash