cat/womens-entrepreneurship-finance
SME Finance Forum member, The European Investment Bank (EIB), is lending EUR 22.3m to Garanti Bank Romania to support businesses in Romania. EUR 5m of the loan amount is devoted to female entrepreneurs, matched by another EUR 5m from Garanti Bank. This transaction is backed by the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), the financial pillar of the Investment Plan for Europe, or "Juncker Plan".
SME Finance Forum member, the European Investment Bank (EIB), signed a new loan with the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance and Economic Cooperation “to further boost female economic inclusion and empowerment across the country.”
Accordingly, the EIB will provide a €30 million long term loan to the Ethiopia Women Entrepreneurship Development Project (WEDP) also funded by the World Bank (WB), which supports micro and small enterprises owned or partly owned by women entrepreneurs.
A study by Calvert Impact Capital found that diversity in senior staff had a greater impact than the number of female directors or the gender of its founder.
“We saw a particularly strong relationship to women in leadership,” said Leigh Moran, Calvert’s director of strategy. “We think there’s a common misconception that incorporating gender is solely limited to investing in women-led businesses.”
SME Finance Forum member Gulf African Bank has signed a deal to finance women in the mining industry. The lender is partnering with the Association of Women in Energy and Extractives Kenya (AWEIK). Under the partnership, women who are interested in supplying items to mining industry players will submit their invoices to the mining, oil and gas companies, obtain local purchase orders (LPOs) and then use these LPOs to apply for loans from Gulf Bank.
Here is one of three Field Notes from the Partnership for Financial Inclusion, a joint initiative of IFC and the Mastercard Foundation, to help DFS providers to tailor products and services to particular market segments as they shed new light on two particular market segments, youth and women, as well as the potential for digitizing social payments on the continent.
Close to 200 senior microfinance practitioners all over the globe will meet to discuss, network and understand the main challenges the industry is facing at the moment. They will present success stories from the leading players on the market, compiled with the most innovative solutions which enable a smooth transition into digital microfinance.
The GBA’s Annual Summit is the flagship event for our membership. Each year, the event is co-hosted by a member bank in a different region of the world. With the presence of bankers, policymakers, multilateral and bilateral representatives, academics, and other stakeholders, the GBA Summit is the seminal and most comprehensive event for women’s financial inclusion in the world.
This booklet presents a compilation of frequently used graphs on entrepreneurship trends and SME performance drawn from the OECD Statistics and Data Directorate’s databases of Structural and Demographic Business Statistics (SDBS), Timely Indicators of Entrepreneurship (TIE), Trade by Enterprise Characteristics (TEC), Entrepreneurship Finance Database (EFD), and the Future of Business Survey (FOBS).
This report, Shifting Social Norms in the Economy for Women's Economic Empowerment, provides an introductory overview to social norms and their relationship to women’s economic empowerment. It also highlights practical tools, approaches and frameworks that practitioners and researchers can use to diagnose, measure and change social norms. Finally, it calls for more systematic collaboration and learning, as addressing social norms change as part of WEE is still a new area of exploration.
