Narrowing the Gender Gap Through Impact Investing
The gender gap — the disparity between men and women in the areas of health, education, politics, and economics — is an obstacle experienced around the world. According to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2020, the average distance completed to global gender parity is at 69 percent. To date, there is still a 31 percent average gender gap that remains to be closed globally. These metrics do show progress being made (albeit slowly): 101 of the 149 countries covered in the report both this year and last year have increased their global scores.
This glaring imbalance represents not only a moral issue but a pervasive economic one. Decades of research reveals that countries with greater gender equality also experience better economic performance.
It’s a fact: The majority of the world’s poor are women. Lack of decent work, lower wages, and longer work days contribute to the income imbalance in almost every country in the world. As stated in Investing in Women and Girls, a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, economic gender inequality costs women in developing nations $9 trillion per year, a sum that would not only give new spending power to women and benefit their families and communities, but would also provide a massive boost to the global economy as a whole.
At Beyond Capital, an impact investment fund, we evaluate each of our potential investments using criteria that not only measures the likelihood of financial returns, but that meet our core social standards. We seek to improve the lives of individuals living below the poverty line in the world’s poorest regions: India and East Africa. Since our founding in 2009, our investments have impacted a growing 5 million people — 3.9 million of them women — by improving the standard of living and alleviating poverty through the provision of healthcare, clean water access, sanitation, energy access, and agriculture tools in the countries where we invest.
Placing women in positions of power is another essential component of closing the gender gap. We look for women in management roles in each company we invest in, and 66 percent of Beyond Capital’s current investments have female co-founders and/or CEOs.
Take for example seven of our investments, each run by women, that have a direct impact on empowering women by improving their quality of life: Bodhi Health Education, FreshR, Frontier Markets, Kasha, Numida, Sanergy, and Tulaa.
Knowledge Is Power
More than 10,000 women living in rural India now receive improved access to healthcare thanks to Bodhi Health Education, an innovative medical training company that provides continuous learning for frontline health workers, including 2,000 females, throughout rural India. Co-founded by Shrutika Girdhar and her husband, Abhinav Girdhar, Bodhi Health Education focuses on such medical practices as maternal and child care, nursing, and dental health, empowering healthcare providers to deliver higher quality care.
Catering to Communities
By building tech-enabled "Wal-Marts of Meat," FreshR is setting standards in fresh meat retail in western India, aggregating farmer produce and building rural and urban distribution networks via logistics and its growing network of smallholder farmers and micro-entrepreneurs. Co-founded by Ambika Satapathy and her husband, Sadananda Satapathy, FreshR is serving an important need in its communities while incentivizing better farming practices, optimizing distribution and the value chain, and modernizing retail.
Lighting the Way
Dangerous cooking and lighting practices lead to 2 million deaths annually around the world, more than half of them children under the age of 5. By providing clean-energy products to villagers living in rural India, Frontier Markets, led by CEO Ajaita Shah, has not only made life safer for these communities (including approximately 1.5 million women), but the company has also created new economic opportunities. The enterprise’s distribution model is based on partnerships with local entrepreneurs, many of them women, to sell the products, fix technical issues, and educate consumers. More than 1,000 women in Rajasthan are now earning a 200 percent increased income, with a projected 11,000 more new female entrepreneurs expected to be added to the network by 2020.
Shopping for Solutions
Female health and hygiene continues to be an overlooked issue in many of the world’s developing countries. In parts of Africa, women and girls don’t have access to proper sanitary items, causing them to miss work and school due to the stigma associated with female reproductive health. Co-founded by Joanna Bichsel, Kasha seeks to solve this problem by utilizing e-commerce technology to make health and hygiene products available to more than 4,000 women living in Rwanda. Women who may not have had access to feminine care items and contraceptives can now order these products confidentially using Kasha’s revolutionary mobile platform and network of 15 female entrepreneurs.
Investing in Small Businesses
Co-founded by Catherine Denis and Mina Shahid, Numida empowers small business owners in Africa with technology-based financial management solutions. An estimated 450,000 micro, small, and medium enterprises generate 90 percent of private sector production and create 4 out 5 new jobs in Uganda. When these businesses thrive, the local economy flourishes and the standard of living improves. Numida helps these small businesses digitize their financial records and provides in-app coaching to equip these entrepreneurs to make better business decisions in order to maximize profit, reduce expenses, manage inventory and secure loans.
Greater Health and Wealth
Proper sanitation is also a major issue for women around the world, with 2.5 billion people lacking access to hygienic facilities. Our investment Sanergy, which was co-founded by Lindsay Stradley, designs, manufactures, and maintains low-cost, high-quality toilets that provide a clean, secure, and private space in communities that previously used unsafe facilities that led to sanitation-related disease, harming families, communities and entire economies.
Sowing the Seeds
Leveling the playing field for smallholder farmers in Africa is at the heart of Tulaa CEO Hillary-Miller Wise's lifework. After 20 years of experience in agricultural and financial services, she founded Tulaa, a forward-thinking agri-tech company that leverages mobile technology and artificial intelligence to connect smallholder farmers — many of whom are women — with input suppliers, investors, and buyers to receive the goods, services, and information they need to improve their outputs and increase their incomes.
Gender Equality Benefits Everyone
All of Beyond Capital’s investments have the power to advance the health, safety, and economy of the regions in which they operate, greatly improving the lives of women in these communities. Each of the companies we partner with have made impressive strides in narrowing the gender gap:
More than 150 female smallholder farmers have quadrupled their annual income with improved access to markets to sell their produce.
Using web-enabled medical services, more than 20,000 women in rural India have received improved access to higher-quality healthcare.
A B2B e-commerce company, Lal10 organizes rural artisans (the majority of them women) in India into productive clusters, teaches modern product design, and sells handicraft products to large international clients.