Investment funds have the potential to transform and foster the inclusion of women in society and business, while promoting sustainable development. These impacts can be achieved simultaneously with generating returns for investors. This is one of the main conclusions drawn from the event held jointly by the Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable Development (CLACDS) of INCAE, Value for Women and SVX MX.
Ximena Trujillo, Executive Director of Inversor de Colombia, highlighted how investing in projects promoted by women is an opportunity for the funds to venture into social businesses, with financial profitability while generating a great social and economic impact in the world and in the companies.
Taking advantage of the catalytic role we have as investors to generate changes in the entrepreneurial ecosystem is pointed out as an important contribution that funds can make to achieve the sustainable development goals, according to María Pía Morante, Investment Director of ALIVE Ventures.
The process of fund impact is not automatic, it is something that must be worked based on a strategy. In this sense, Diego Serebrisky, partner at Dalus Capital, recommended that the organization should not set as a goal to have the perfect investment program with a gender lens to start working with women. Rather, start with small steps until the entire organization is developing in this direction and thus make a transformation that is sustainable over time.
The form of communication and relationships with stakeholders must also be considered to achieve the desired impact. Leonor Gutierrez, director of the Women's Agriculture Initiative, WAI, at Root Capital commented on the importance of having human conversations to achieve the strategic objectives of inclusion.
As part of the dynamics of the event, the Gender Smart Nexus tool was presented, which seeks to provide a concrete overview of the progress of gender inclusion practices in organizations through a self-diagnosis and also contribute to the generation of benchmarks. This tool was presented by Norman Sarria, Co-Founder of Value For Women and Gender and Business Expert.
Rebecca Fries, CEO and Co-Founder of Value for Women, moderated the conversation with the fund managers on the panel, and also shared some of the learnings that Value For Women has been building through more than a decade of practice. One of these learnings is that there are diverse paths to Gender Responsive Investing, which is evidenced by the diverse experiences of the panel. More will be published on this topic in April.
In addition, Gracia María Barahona, Manager of the Training Program for Progressing Women Entrepreneurs (EMPRO) of Honduras and director of the Ecobanking Project, both from CLACDS, opened the webinar.
The associative work to transform these ideas into reality was pointed out as one of the necessary conditions to incorporate the gender lens in organizations. According to Ronald Arce, executive director of CLACDS/INCAE, it is essential to move from the generation of thought to implementation and for this reason work and join efforts with different allies so that these ideas become realities.
To learn in detail about what was discussed, you can watch the recording of the webinar at the following link. This was the third event of reflections on gender-sensitive investments, the first was held in July last year with the webinar "Investments with a gender lens for the progress of the region", the second webinar "Best practices, strategies and tools to close gender gaps in investment funds" was held in October.
For more information on this topic or the initiative, please contact mauren.esquivel@incae.edu.
