Impact-Linked Fund for Gender Inclusive Fintech (ILF for GIF)
Catalyzing women’s financial inclusion with Impact-Linked Finance
Although female financial inclusion offers disproportionately deep and lasting impact benefits, women consistently continue to make up the majority of the world’s poor and financially excluded. Inclusive fintech solutions in emerging markets hold significant potential to close financial inclusion gaps by accelerating cost-effective and convenient access to financial services for women. Despite this, private sector investments in fintech companies are not geared toward leveraging this potential. Women-led fintechs and those that are already gender-inclusive struggle to access the capital they need to scale.
Impact-Linked Finance holds the potential to resolve this dilemma, aligning incentives to better serve marginalized women. While women are commercially attractive fintech customers in the long term, a targeted approach is needed to better serve them and create lasting value. Impact-Linked Finance enables and encourages this alignment by rewarding positive outcomes with financial incentives. The Impact-Linked Fund for Gender Inclusive Fintech (ILF for GIF) provides Impact-Linked Finance and technical assistance to fintechs to support a stronger focus on gender-transformative outcomes for financial inclusion. Fintechs, identified by renowned impact investment funds, are directly rewarded with financial incentives for achieving social impact, improving their profitability. The investment from the partnering impact funds helps the fintechs to scale, magnifying their impact even further.
In March 2022, this fund secured commitments of USD 13.4 million from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the Austrian Development Agency in a first closing. The full target fund size is USD 21 million.
