Women’s World Banking: Gender lens investing is more than backing women founders
Women's World Banking Asset Management (WAM) has a big focus on sub-Saharan Africa with its second emerging markets fund, president and CEO Mary Ellen Iskenderian , the latest member of our Dealmakers to Watch series, told PE Hub .
New York-based Women’s World Banking is a global nonprofit organization dedicated to serving the nearly one billion women excluded by the formal financial sector, according to the firm. Iskenderian, based in New York herself, joined WWB in 2006 and now oversees the organization’s asset management business that makes direct equity investments in financial service providers as a means to advance women in the workplace and as customers.
Iskenderian started her career at Lehman Brothers, but gravitated toward the International Finance Corporation fairly early on. Women’s economic empowerment is very close to her heart and in 2022, her first book, ‘There’s Nothing Micro About a Billion Women: Making Finance Work for Women’ was published by MIT Press.
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“We have a different view to what gender lens investing is and can be,” said Iskenderian. “In recent years it has focused on backing women-owned or -led companies. We love our women founders and leaders, but if the leadership of a company is diverse or even male, but the business really understands what the needs of women are, we’re all in.”
Women’s World Banking Asset Management has raised two emerging markets funds. The first is a $50 million fund that invested in 10 microfinance institutions.?WAM closed its second fund for financial inclusion at $103 million in 2022, for which the European Union and German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) provided “a very important” first loss piece of capital, said Iskenderian. “That has allowed us to take a little more risk, go into earlier-stage companies,” she added. “They require 40 percent of the portfolio to be in sub-Saharan Africa, that’s been a great impetus for us.”