6 February 2019 | Report
Catalytic Capital for Women’s Economic Empowerment: Report of the External Review of Component 2 of the Investing in Women Initiative
Summary
This report summarises the findings and recommendations of the external review of Component 2 (C2) on impact investing of the Investing in Women Initiative (IW) funded by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
The external review was carried out on July and August 2018. It comprised interviews with some 30 key stakeholders and analysis of more than 100 documents.
The report finds that the first phase of IW’s C2 was successful, where IW and DFAT played leadership roles in increasing capital flows to women-owned and women-led small and medium enterprises and promoting gender lens investing. The report recommends that IW and DFAT proceed to a Phase 2 of Component 2 for an additional four years.
Highlights
- Overall, the review team found that Phase 1 of C2 was appropriately designed and successfully implemented to date. Through its performance-based partnerships with four impact investors, and engagement of leading champions of gender-lens investing in market-building, C2 made good progress towards its intermediate end-of program outcomes.
- The accomplishments of C2 included: testing and refining a grant-based model to incentivise gender-lens investing by investment partners, facilitating an internal strengthening of gender-lens investing capacity by impact investing partners, animating an ecosystem-building process in the region and globally, and achieving early significant leverage on private-sector capital in Phase 1 by C2 and its partners.
- The review team recommends that IW and DFAT proceed to a second phase for Component 2. The focus of Phase 2 should be on demonstrating the commercial business case for investing in women’s small to medium enterprises and in engaging with impact investors and partners based in Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam and in Asia more broadly.
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