If a bank makes targeted efforts to better serve women customers, does this necessarily mean men are shortchanged? Global experts at the recent Global Banking Alliance for Women (GBA) All-Stars Academy in the Dominican Republic agreed with a resounding “no”.
Narrowing the global gender gap could add $12 trillion in annual global gross domestic product by 2025. In Latin America and the Caribbean, access to finance for women-led companies is a key driver of this gap. Two out of five small and medium-sized businesses in the region are owned or managed by women, yet 70% of them still have unserved or underserved credit needs. Despite this discrepancy, there is an overwhelming sense of optimism: more than two thirds of active, early-stage women entrepreneurs are opening businesses because they see clear opportunities, not out of necessity.
We have consensus that Impact Investing is a fast growing field attracting a lot of attention. The Monitor Group estimates it could grow to $500 billion in the next 10 years, whereas others estimate this figure in the trillions. However, we still lack consensus on what exactly Impact Investing is and what is needed to bring it mainstream. In Tuesday’s Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and GIIN Forum on Impact Investing in Latin America and the Caribbean, GIIN's CEO Luther Ragin defined Impact Investing as an investment made by an investor with the express intention of 1) achieving positive social and/or environmental benefits and 2) earning a rate of return.
In light of the number of initiatives developed in Latin America and the Caribbean to help increase the availability and use of sex-disaggregated demand-side (customer) and supply-side (institution) data across the ecosystem, you may think we’ve moved on from asking financial intermediaries: “How big is the women’s market opportunity in Latin America and the Caribbean?” to “Did the women’s market initiative perform as expected”? We have not.