Two organizations have been selected to receive funds in the expanded Accelerating Women Climate Entrepreneurs Fund. With funding support from FMO, Dutch Entrepreneurial Development Bank, the project seeks to build the gender lens investing ecosystem for growth-oriented women entrepreneurs to grow scalable climate-related businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa. Each winner will receive up to $65,500 over one year to test models for increasing gender lens investing in women climate entrepreneurs with SGBs through innovative approaches.
Extant research results illustrate that women are roughly half as likely to become entrepreneurs as men (Kauffman Compilation: Research on Gender and Entrepreneurship, 2016). However, women may see themselves fit in traditionally male jobs when the language used in the job advertisement is communal in nature (Gaucher, 2011), and vice versa. To empirically test this idea, the authors first sought to understand if there were any gender biases in the accelerators’ calls for applications using a validated scale of masculine and feminine words. They found a higher percentage of feminine words across most regions, which is in the opposite direction of what was expected. Second, the authors manipulated the language used in an accelerator program call for application (1) with the percentage of gendered words found from the accelerators on the ANDE list (3-4%) and (2) an exaggerated percentage of gendered words (9%), to see how it affected women and men’s perceptions of the accelerator program. In general, men in the U.S. express high entrepreneurial fit, sense of belonging, and application success possibly because the U.S. is high on both individualism and masculinity on Hoefstede’s country culture dimensions. However, women in Latin America report results that are opposite to men in the United States.
“It was a turning point for me,” said Ruchi Jain, Founder and CEO of Taru Naturals, about her trip to the villages of small-scale farmers in India struggling with the effects of climate change. “I realized that if you want to make a big impact on the world, you have to be grassroots based—it has to be a movement.” Since then, Jain has grown Taru Naturals into a fair-trade network connecting over 10,000 tribal and small-scale organic farmers across India to the resources and training they need to grow climate-resilient crops and markets to sell their products.
Invite-only event
9:30 - Registration
10:00 - Program begins
11:15 - Networking
Read ANDE's break-down of recent IPCC reports to find out why SGB's should be at the center of the global fight against climate change.
"Em 2019, a ANDE anunciou uma parceria empolgante com a USAID e a Visa Foundation para lançar a Iniciativa de Igualdade de Gênero da ANDE (AGEI), que visa apoiar mulheres como líderes, funcionárias e consumidoras no setor de SGB de mercados emergentes. Como um projeto piloto sob a AGEI, cada um dos oito escritórios regionais da ANDE hospedou um Laboratório para Ação em Igualdade de Gênero de 9 a 12 meses. O Laboratório para Ação da ANDE utiliza um processo de design participativo em que um grupo de stakeholders regionais, com experiência profunda e diversificada e expertise em determinado assunto, se reúne para definir problemas e, em seguida, criar e testar soluções potenciais em conjunto."
"A Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) lançou o Fundo Avançado para o Empoderamento das Mulheres (AWEF, na sigla em inglês) em 2019 com o apoio da Visa Foundation e da Agência dos Estados Unidos para o Desenvolvimento Internacional (USAID). O objetivo geral dos projetos financiados pelo AWEF é abordar a lacuna de gênero para financiamento para pequenas empresas em crescimento (SGBs)1 pertencentes a mulheres em economias em desenvolvimento. A primeira rodada de grantmaking, a AWEF Asia, financiou oito organizações de apoio a empreendedores (ESOs) no Camboja, Vietnã, Mianmar, Filipinas, Paquistão e Índia, bem como programas que servem a região como um todo."