International day for the rights of women

We consider gender equality as both a human right and a means to reach sustainable people-centered growth.  We continuously evaluate and improve our activities to channel capital towards business investments and transactions with the potential to sustainably improve women’s economic opportunities in our target markets. 

Over the past few years, FMO has developed tools and processes to continuously improve on gender equality. In 2017, we approved our Gender Strategy and Position Statement on Gender, and committed to closing the gender gap in five key areas:

(1)  Ensuring equality of employment opportunities for women as employees in supported businesses.

(2) An integrated ESG approach to identify risks and opportunities for women as project-affected people.

(3)  Investing in companies with women in leadership positions.

(4) Investing in products and services that explicitly benefit women as end-user.

(5) Investing in female entrepreneurs.  

At the end of the year, a total of €185 million of new investments in the Agribusiness, Food & Water, Financial Institutions, Energy and Private Equity sectors also qualified for 2X Challenge.

Noteworthy investments and programs

In 2020, we invested €151 million in gender-lens investing for women-owned SMEs, increased from the previous year by €4 million; these new investments were made in the Agribusiness, Food & Water, Financial Institutions, Energy and Private Equity sectors, where we invest with a carefully designed approach. For example,

• In Private Equity we focus on promoting gender-balanced leadership and workforces from investees, such as through the Collaborative for Frontier Finance.
• In Energy, the gender aspect is embedded throughout our investment process and we actively engage and incentivize customers towards gender equality. 
• In Financial Institutions, we expanded our focus to non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), to expand our outreach and provide credit specifically to women-owned microenterprises—for example, through Fin’ELLE/COFINA Group. To learn more about our focus on non-financial services, click here for the report.  

Making the difference  

We measure and monitor our contribution to gender equality with various indicators based on our Reduced Inequalities (RI-)label and the criteria provided by the 2X Challenge. 

As a result, it is easier to identify gender-smart investments, define strategies and monitor impact. See also our annual report.

The way forward

While embedding these into our work and impact is crucial, it would be meaningless if we did not start with our own workforce. At FMO, our policy is to reward women and men equally for similar work across the organization, but in 2020, we still noted a 1,8% gap in the salaries of men and women, benefitting men. This has been taken into consideration and part of our efforts in the future is to correct this gap and address any gender inequalities that may persist and have no place in our company.

Today and every day, we are breaking the bias and committed to gender equality for a sustainable tomorrow.