April 8th, 2022 – Impact Investment Exchange’s (IIX) Women’s Livelihood Bond™ (WLB) Series wins Environmental Finance’s 2022 Bond Awards for Innovation. The award recognizes IIX for its use of proceeds in the latest issuance in the WLB™ Series, the US$30M WLB4Climate, which is set to impact an estimated 500,000 women and girls across South and Southeast Asia, transforming them into agents of climate action.
Barclays was proud to work with Impact Investment Exchange (IIX) to issue its fourth Women’s Livelihood Bond™ for Climate (WLB4C).
The proceeds will directly support women-led and climate-focused enterprises in India, Indonesia, Cambodia and the Philippines, and are expected to benefit nearly 500,000 under-served women and girls in the developing markets.
December 14, 2021 – SINGAPORE – Impact Investment Exchange (IIX) has successfully priced the US$30 million Women’s Livelihood Bond™ for Climate (WLB4Climate), the fourth bond in the award-winning Women’s Livelihood Bond™ Series (WLB Series). Advancing a total of 14 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the WLB4Climate will support an estimated 500,000 underserved women and girls in Asia to build resilient, sustainable, climate-friendly economies in the region.
July 6, 2021 – SINGAPORE – Impact Investment Exchange (IIX)’s Women’s Livelihood BondTM 1 (WLB1), the world’s first gender lens and impact investing instrument to be listed on a stock exchange (the Singapore Exchange), matured on July 6, 2021. With all coupon payments and principal payments made on time, even throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bond provided investors with an annual return of 5.65% from 2017-2021. The WLB1 is the first issuance of the US$150M Women’s Livelihood Bond Series, a series of innovative debt securities that creates sustainable livelihoods for over 3 million underserved women across the Asia-Pacific and other emerging markets. In addition to its strong financial performance, all social performance targets, including targets for increased financial inclusion and financial resilience, were met or exceeded, demonstrating the sustainability of the bond’s underlying portfolio throughout the pandemic.
December 7, 2020 – SINGAPORE – Impact Investment Exchange (IIX) has successfully priced the US$27.7 million Women’s Livelihood BondTM 3 (WLB3), the third bond in the award-winning Women’s Livelihood BondTM Series (WLB Series). Advancing a total of 13 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the WLB3 complies with the International Capital Markets Association (ICMA) Social Bond Principles and will support 180,000 underserved women and women entrepreneurs in the Asia Pacific region to respond, to recover from, and to build resilience in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The WLB3 is also the maiden investment of IIX’s Women’s Catalyst Fund, a next generation gender lens vehicle designed to accelerate innovative financial instruments for women.
During these unprecedented times when COVID-19 has exacerbated systemic social and economic inequalities, there is renewed interest in sustainable investing and creating positive change for the world’s poorest – both for national economic recovery as well as global sustainable development. At the same time, there are also rising concerns about “impact washing” or “pandemic washing” – where money is deployed to “business as usual” investments, that may even reinforce rather than reduce inequalities. READ MORE
When Durreen Shahnaz first floated the idea of creating a new financing vehicle explicitly to help underserved women entrepreneurs in Asia, bankers and financiers advised her against including the word “women.” Calling it the Women’s Livelihood Bond, they said, might chase away investors. Better to just call it an emerging market bond. No way, said Shahnaz, founder and chief executive of Singapore-based Impact Investment Exchange (IIX). READ MORE
August 18, 2020 – SINGAPORE AND PANAMA – IIX Foundation (IIX), a registered 501(c)3 organization dedicated to building a more inclusive world, has partnered with Green Cross (GC), a global non-governmental organization addressing the combined challenges of environmental security, poverty and environmental degradation, to bring women to the forefront of climate action.
May 20, 2020 – SINGAPORE – Impact Investment Exchange (IIX)’s Women’s Livelihood BondTM Series (WLB Series) has won the P4G Scale-Up Partnership to scale a first of its kind innovative finance solution for gender-equal COVID-resilience and green growth across Asia. P4G, or Partnering for Green Growth and the Global Goals 2030, is a collaborative partnership among 12 partner countries: Bangladesh, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Republic of Korea, South Africa and Vietnam, and is funded by the governments of Denmark and the Netherlands.
