From Spring Accelerator - Aimed at investors and other development practitioners, this toolkit highlights the potential of using finance to impact and empower adolescent girls and young women in emerging markets. The toolkit is based on the work of SPRING and four years of experience in running its accelerator for girls and young women impact ventures in East Africa and South Asia. This specific focus on gender and age-group in emerging markets represents a convergence of three recent movements in investment: gender lens investing, impact investing and investing in youth. As the context and background sections of this toolkit make clear, there is a wide variety of exciting investment opportunities in this space, across a range of sectors.

From ICRW - Learn how to better integrate gender into investment processes to make smarter investments that enhance returns, gender equality and women’s economic empowerment.

Jessica Espinoza Trujano & Anne-Marie Lévesque (Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment)- “Development finance institutions (DFIs) play a major role in mobilizing private sector investments in developing countries. While there has recently been an increasing interest among DFIs in gender-lens investing, these efforts have been somewhat blind to the question of women’s unpaid work and have not yet led to a stronger investment focus on the care economy. Adopting what has been defined by other feminist scholars as a transformative approach to care, this article analyses the potential transformative effects of private sector investments in the care economy by DFIs to help build more resilient and gender-equitable economies following the global COVID-19 pandemic. The authors find there is significant potential for DFIs to approach investments with a more strategic gender- and care-lens and contribute to the recognition, reduction, redistribution, reward, and representation of care work, in line with their objective to promote sustainable socioeconomic development in developing countries.”

From Agence Française de Développement and UN Women. This report offers a unique perspective with concrete examples of how Public Development Banks (PDBs) have delivered on a gender equality agenda across their varied mandates, histories and methods of engagement. The report’s case-studies show both internal and external approaches and practices to tackling gender equality. It underlines and demonstrates the tremendous benefit for PDBs in understanding how to address and measure their own gender equality, either as organizations and/or with their partners, in order to create a more inclusive and equal world.

The 2X Challenge serves as one instrument in the DFI toolkit to direct capital towards women’s development. The 2X Challenge calls the G7 and other DFIs to collectively commit and mobilize $15 billion that provide women in developing country markets with improved access to leadership opportunities, quality employment, finance, enterprise support and products and services that enhance economic participation and access.

DFIs can use the 2X Challenge to direct capital towards women, pre- or post-investment by:

• Encouraging investees to collect data on women employees and consumers

• Measuring the development impact of investing with and in women, over time

• Making a business case for investing with and in women

Fulfilling one of the five criteria makes an investment 2X eligible.

From Transform Finance. What would investment to communities look like if those very communities were part of the process? This report makes the case for grassroots engagement, participation, and governance over investments.

Gender lens investing (GLI) is based on the premise that investing in companies that promote gender equality through their internal policies or through their business activities is not only morally responsible but can lead to higher financial returns. To date, the majority of GLI in Sub-Saharan Africa has been carried out through dedicated investment vehicles such as Alitheia, a Nigerian private equity fund which uses a gender lens approach, or initiatives such as the IFC’s Banking on Women (in conjunction with Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women). Now, a number of development finance institutions (DFIs), development agencies and investor groups are looking to expand the footprint of GLI, popularise gender considerations in investing and provide greater clarity about GLI.

Gender bonds, as a recent development in both the themed bond space and in the GLI space, are still relatively poorly defined, beyond being bonds that support the advancement, empowerment and equality of women. No official or universal definition exists. Like other themed bonds, gender bonds can be issued as senior unsecured notes referencing the balance sheet of the issuer, where proceeds are ringfenced for specific use on eligible ‘gender’ activities, or as securitisations referencing a pool of assets directly (e.g. issued off balance sheet by an SPV into which a portfolio of eligible loans are placed).

From Criterion Institute. Gender-based violence is material to infrastructure investments. Infrastructure projects designed without a gender lens can lead to unintended consequences, including higher rates of violence; at the same time, well-designed projects can decrease violence and help countries meet development objectives. Institutions can design their investment processes to incorporate a gender-based violence analysis and get to better outcomes.