Singapore’s IIX closes the latest in its Women’s Livelihood Bonds series which invest in high-impact enterprises focused on advancing gender equality.
Singapore-based Impact Investment Exchange (IIX) has raised US$50m for its fifth Women’s Livelihood Bond, set to improve the livelihoods of 300,000 women and girls in Asia and Africa.
ImpactAlpha, December 14 – Singapore-based IIX has raised $50 million for the fifth bond in its Women’s Livelihood Bond series. The bond will support 300,000 low-income women and girls in Asia and Africa. The bond is the first in the series to finance women-centric initiatives outside of Asia.
It is also the first designated under the Orange Bond Principles, which IIX spearheaded to shift capital in the $130 trillion global bond market to support women and girls. (Orange is the color used for Sustainable Development Goal No. 5, achieving gender equality.) The bond “will set the momentum for many Orange Bond transactions to come in the near future, making it a game changer for the sustainable financing market,” said Stephen Liberatore of Nuveen, an investor in the bond.
IIX is a pioneer of gender-focused listed bonds, launching its first Women’s Livelihood Bond in 2017. It raised $8 million.
The impact investment firm closed its fourth bond in the series, which invests in women’s climate resilience, earlier this year.
A portion of the fifth bond’s proceeds will also be used to “empower women to advance climate action,” the firm said.
The Impact Investment Exchange (IIX) has raised $50 million with what it said is the first ‘green and orange’ bond, with proceeds targeted to empower women to advance climate action.
Called the Women’s Livelihood Bond 5 (WLB5), it securitises a portfolio of loans to high-impact enterprises that cannot usually access international capital markets, lead placement agent ANZ said in a Tuesday (Dec 13) press release.
With less than a decade to address critically climate change and the other UN SDGs, the pressure is on to find innovative and inclusive solutions. The pre-COVID US$2-3 trillion annual SDG financing gap in developing economies has increased to an estimated $4-5 trillion per year. Given this financing gap, the global financial system is positioned to play an integral and increasingly important role in addressing the gap. However, much of the architecture of the global financial system was built without designing for the unique needs of developing economies, designing for environmental responsibility, gender equality, or equality more broadly.
The Environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) movement has promoted rebuilding the financial system to consider these risks better, but even deeper integration of these considerations is fundamental for post-COVID recovery and deceleration of climate change. And both of these battles are fundamentally intertwined with gender equality:
Building ‘Forward’ Better: The COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing conflicts worldwide, and the climate crisis have jointly exacerbated the regressive effects on gender inequality – as a result, the eradication of the global gender pay gap is now set back by over a century. Women were almost twice as likely to lose their livelihoods during the pandemic, due to various factors such as disproportionate childcare burdens to labor market asymmetries. Building forward better underscores an opportunity to redress these failures and re-structure economies that better integrate and empower women. Closing the gender-regressive gap in the workforce could add up to US$13 trillion to global GDP by 2030. In light of this substantial economic impact, gender equality must be central to post-COVID recovery.
While Indian startups have successfully set a new record for the best-ever fundraising quarter in the first quarter of 2022 – raising around $19 billion, startups in India saw a fall in funding by 37% quarter-on-quarter in Q2 2022. Yet on the flip side, a total of 78 Indian VCs and funds have raised over $12.3 billion.
3rd annual report demonstrates initial impact of the Fund’s 18 million diverse, global portfolio
NEW YORK | July 18, 2022 – The Rockefeller Foundation released its annual Zero Gap Fund: 2021 State of the Portfolio report capturing the crucial role that catalytic capital plays in enabling investment solutions to solve the world’s most pressing challenges. Across its seven investments to date, the Fund has mobilized $582 million in private finance toward a diverse portfolio of high-impact investment strategies. The Fund added two investments in 2021, bringing total commitments to $18 million of the $30 million fund.
The Zero Gap Fund was launched in 2019 in partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It deploys patient, risk-tolerant, and flexible capital into promising, impact-driven financial strategies and mechanisms that seek to boost large-scale private investment in advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
“Innovative financial mechanisms like those supported by the Zero Gap Fund demonstrate the power of catalytic capital to cultivate and scale impact-driven investment strategies. With the SDGs being undercut by Covid-19, climate change, and other crises, the need is both critical and urgent for investment solutions that marry impact and return and mobilize significant private capital to such strategies” said Maria Kozloski, Senior Vice President, Innovative Finance, The Rockefeller Foundation. “As the Zero Gap Fund’s portfolio matures, we are seeing encouraging results even in the face of broader instability in the market.”
Read our latest Impact report 2021
IIX has dedicated the last thirteen years to pioneering and building an inclusive multi-stakeholder ecosystem to show the world that women and underserved communities across the Global South are more than just a demographic and defiant leaders of change with the power to transform their families, communities, and the world by being a part of the financial markets.
– Prof Durreen Shahnaz
Read our 2021 impact report that reflects our work and achievements in the year.
by Durreen Shahnaz
Right before the pandemic, I spoke at an impact investing conference in New York.
As the founder and CEO of Impact Investment Exchange, I’ve seen how much actual impact impact investing can have — and how it can reinforce old, problematic norms.
As usual, I was among the few women of color invited to speak alongside an otherwise white male panel. And as is typical for women of color at these conferences, I had to endure input on my choice of attire — being asked to avoid wearing an ethnic dress (a saree in my instance) — as well as the casual dismissals of my remarks and the general fawning over “distinguished white men.”
In her own words, the founder of Impact Investment Exchange tells us why climate change and feminism come hand in hand.
I stared at the painting. I squinted my eyes, and tilted my head, but could not figure out why the painting did not look right. I like to think of myself as a painter, but when I try to take flavours from my favorite feminist painter, Frida, I struggle.
Frida could effortlessly blend with oil, her political views, agony, and love as spirited attempts to express her own reality. I chewed on the end of my paintbrush, wondering how she did so time and again. The answer stared back at me from in between the interplay of green and blue textures.