First came the policy, then the practice. How gender equality trickled down from two red pages in Minister Kaag’s policy note, through the Building Prospects fund, to a sub-Saharan electricity company.
“They have become quite famous, the two red pages in minister Kaag’s policy note on the goals for gender equality. Supporting women has been a key component in the Foreign Policy of the Netherlands for a long time. The Netherlands has supported the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) since they were established in 2015, including SDG 5 on gender equality. The policy note enhanced this and gave it extra focus.
Promoting gender equality is not only the moral thing to do, it is a solid business case
Part of gender equality is women's economic empowerment. From the economic and private sector perspective, promoting gender equality is not only the moral thing to do, it is a solid business case. Women represent 50% of the possible labor force in a country and women who work invest up to 90% of their income into their families, compared to 40% for men.
The first and foremost question for us from the department for Sustainable Economic Development is how we can translate SDG 5 into actual action. What can we do and how can we do it together with the private sector? We made a Gender Action Plan. Two important goals were 1) start discussion with implementing partners to create and implement a gender strategy 2) improve impact on gender equality over the years by learning from the previous years.
Building Prospects invests significantly in the agriculture sector. This sector is known for having many women workers. Therefore, Building Prospects is a relevant partner to reach our goals on gender equality. We already knew we were making a difference for women in agricultural sector, but we needed to include this explicitly in our strategy. Besides, we needed to know exactly how is Buildings Prospects having an impact on women. With this baseline we could see how to further improve and create more impact. When renewing the mandate for Building Prospects, in 2018, this was the perfect moment to institutionalize our goals and targets for gender equality.”
"My work is to ensure that the investments that are made with money from the Building Prospects fund are in line with the intentions of the Dutch government. When Sigrid Kaag became minister of Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, Building Prospects was just renewing its mandate and therefore the Ministry added gender equality as a cross-cutting theme to the fund. For me that meant with any new investment, I had to ask about the role of women and impact on gender equality, which was also a new field for me.
So the investment officer got excited about the gender focus, and talked to the client: how can you cater better for women?
I started very practically. On the evaluation form I added the topic gender: what is the impact on gender equality of this investment and does the company pro-actively think about the role of women? It gives a natural starting point for a discussion with the investment officer. Building Prospects invests roughly in three sectors: agriculture, (energy) infrastructure and climate mitigation and adaption.
We decided to start with a focus on agri, thinking the impact on women through infrastructure development and climate investments is more indirect. A study FMO commissioned with the help of LadyAgri showed that the majority of women in the agri-value chain fall beneath the radar of banks and Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). Many are ‘invisible’ because agri commodities are often sold by men, and the land used to cultivate them is registered in the man’s name, leaving the role of women in the production process undetected. We wanted to change that.
For the investment officers this also means that they need a different mindset. For example, I asked about the gender component of an investment in a tractor company in Asia. There isn’t any, is what I heard. But it appeared that a large part of their customers were women, many of them widowed, and very much in need of a tractor. The company was already targeting them actively. So the investment officer got excited about the gender focus, and talked to the client: how can you cater better for women? Can we help you there? And with such a huge market segment, would it be beneficial to have women represented in the management of the company?
Women in the agri value chain might be invisible to most in the financial sector, but they are definitely there. The Ministry’s choice for gender lens investing, empowers me to ask our investment officers to look for them.
After the new mandate for Building Prospects was set, Floor came to me with two questions. What does FMO already do on investing with a gender lens and what can we add? It is my job to embed the topic of inclusive business - including gender equality - within FMO’s policies and to advise our customers on these issues.
Building Prospects gives us the opportunity to see how it works out if we systematically ask upfront: what is the gender impact in this investment?
FMO is part of the 2X Challenge, a partnership between development finance institutions in which we commit to investments that focus on the inclusion of women. With this collaborative we send a shared message as investors about the importance of women’s empowerment, and aim to answer the question: what does it look like? There are criteria for the investments to be eligible of the 2X Challenge. It identifies for example what the role of women is within a company. Are there women in management? Are they employees? Are they the end users of the product?
These criteria became the framework Floor uses for Building Prospects, but she also extended it. She added an analysis of the role of women in the wider value chain of the company. This is quite a new angle, which I think is a very good addition to look at the people working as suppliers, distributors, etcetera. The beauty of the Building Prosects fund is that it asks us to take risk, to be even more of a frontrunner in sustainable investing then FMO already is. So going a step further than the existing framework really fits with the fund. Building Prospects gives us the opportunity to see how it works out if we systematically ask upfront: what is the gender impact in this investment?
A misconception of gender lens investing is that you can only do investments that are good for women. But gender lens investing means much more. You assess what the investment does for the position of women. What risks come with the investment and which opportunities? Then you can take that information into account. Gender lens investing has developed so much the past three years. I am happy to see it is becoming more mainstream. Customers even ask ús now, what can we do to enhance the position of women through our business? Greenlight Planet is wonderful example of this.
"Before our customers start using our products, they often lacked electricity in their homes, either due to unreliable supply or complete absence of the electric grid. We design, manufacture, and distribute solar powered energy products to address this lack. Greenlight Planet is the leading provider of off-grid solar lanterns and home systems in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Our Sun King solar powered lanterns and home systems add hours to every day, allowing children to study after dark, play and grow and adults to utilize more productive, safer and more social time.
Women and children benefit most from our products, as in many cultures they tend to spend more of their time indoors than adult men. Women are also the ones most often tasked with collecting fuel and use of energy resources, spending up to 5 hours per day on this. This is called ‘time poverty’, the burden on women is disproportional. Because of these gender roles, women are important consumers and end users of off-grid technologies. Our products help them cut the time they spend on collecting fuel, allowing them more productive time to generate an income and work on other household chores.
The investment from FMO in Greenlight Planet in 2019 has helped us expand our Pay-As-You-Go business in Sub-Saharan Africa. Through FMO and other DFI investors in our business, we were also made aware of and joined the 2x challenge. We already have quite good numbers on female employees and women in management, but we want and need to improve.
At Greenlight, more than 40 percent of our workforce is female. Even more in Kenya: 54 percent of the more than 500 Greenlight Planet employees in the country are female. If you look at the people managers at Greenlight, globally, 28 percent are women. Greenlight’s leadership team is committed to ensuring greater gender balance across all teams and increasing the representation of women in management positions. We have set out to draft a gender action plan to support further inclusion and ensure that our workforce ultimately mirrors the gender representation of our consumer base.’’
