Australia is pleased to announce a partnership with Indonesian company Terratai to seed fund its investment window, offering long-term, fit-for-purpose capital to early-stage women-led nature-based solutions (NBS) businesses across Indonesia.
NBS are most effective, efficient, and resilient when women face no barriers to participating in or benefiting from them. In addition to their critical role in climate mitigation and biodiversity protection, women-led NBS focused companies can have multiplier effects that help advance progress on health and gender-related SDGs and contribute to economic development and are key to meeting global climate and development goals.
An Australian Government Initiative, Investing in Women (IW) established an Innovation Window that enables fund managers to develop and pilot alternative financial structures that address the needs of women led small businesses (WSB). Working with deep local knowledge of their specific country contexts and a growing pipeline of investible WSB within their countries, Innovation Window partners mainstream successful measures and build the business case and know-how for investing in WSBs through collaborating across the investment ecosystem.
In this photo: Terratai engaged in a discussion during the Investing in Women onboarding meeting.
Founded in 2022, Terratai is dedicated to growing early-stage ventures into sustainable companies that can help nature to recover and thrive. Drawing on a deep familiarity with the Asian venture landscape, and leveraging AUD 1.8 million of IW funding, Terratai’s blended finance facility will target a range of investment solutions towards innovative and early-stage women-led companies that support nature and biodiversity. Terratai will further de-risk these investments by providing long term, customised venture building support to each venture to aid in their expansion and economic resilience.
Terratai CEO Matt Leggett said, “We’re incredibly excited to kick-off this partnership with Investing in Women. We have seen from our conversations with female entrepreneurs across Indonesia that women-led businesses struggle to raise investment and to reach scale – for nature focused companies this bar is even higher. This partnership with IW will accelerate our ability to invest in and support women led companies that are doing incredible work to protect and restore Indonesia’s most at-risk land and seascapes.”
IW CEO Hannah Birdsey said, “It is evident that Terratai and IW share the objective of building a finance system that better meets the needs of women entrepreneurs. In this case, Terratai’s target market of nature-based companies allows women to become a part of the solution to the ever-growing climate crisis by providing their businesses with the resources needed to grow and scale.”
Since 2016, IW has played a catalytic role in increasing access to capital available to SMEs that disproportionately benefit women in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam through its Gender Lens Investing workstream. Alongside the Innovation Window, IW continues to mainstream demand for gender lens investing through market building partnerships and deploy capital to gender transformative funds, in partnership with Australian Development Investments.