Across Africa, growing attention to sustainable finance is creating new opportunities to mobilise capital towards development priorities, including gender equality and women's economic empowerment.
For UN Women, unlocking this opportunity requires more than developing new financial instruments. It requires strengthening the capacity of financial institutions to understand, design, evaluate and implement financing approaches that integrate gender considerations into investment and capital mobilisation.
This was the focus of a recent capacity-building engagement between UN Women and the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development (EBID) in Lomé, Togo. The programme brought together EBID senior leadership and technical teams from across the institution to deepen understanding of sustainable finance and gender-responsive financing instruments, while exploring how these approaches can support the Bank's broader institutional and development objectives.
Moving Gender Finance from Concept to Practice
Gender-responsive finance encompasses a range of approaches and instruments that can help direct capital towards investments that contribute to gender equality. These can include gender bonds, social and sustainability bonds, gender-lens investment strategies and other forms of sustainable finance that incorporate gender-related objectives, eligibility criteria and impact considerations. The Lomé engagement therefore focused not on a single financial product, but on building the institutional knowledge required to assess and apply these approaches effectively.
Participants explored the global and regional gender finance landscape, international market standards including the International Capital Market Association (ICMA) principles. The programme also drew on UN Women's guidance documents including the Bonds to bridge the gender gap: A practitioner’s guide to using sustainable debt for gender equality; Case study series: Innovative financing for gender equality via bonds; and Gender bonds: A toolkit for the design and issuance of gender bonds in Africa (available in French and English).
Financing Gender Equality at Scale
While Africa's financing needs are significant, the resources dedicated to advancing gender equality remain insufficient. Women entrepreneurs across the continent face an estimated $42 billion financing[1], and closing it could add up to $316 billion to Africa's GDP[2]. Therefore, the challenge is not simply to increase the amount of capital available, but in tandem, to strengthen the systems through which that capital is allocated.
Financial institutions including regional development finance institutions such as EBID, can play an important role in this process by integrating gender considerations into investment strategies, financing frameworks, project pipelines and impact measurement.
“The opportunity is not simply to create more gender-labelled financial products. It is to strengthen the financial ecosystem so that capital can systematically identify, finance and measure investments that advance women’s economic empowerment.” – Ijeoma Madueke, CFA, Strategic Advisor, Sustainable Finance, UN Women West and Central Africa Regional Office
"Working with UN Women has sharpened our understanding of what it takes to move from ambition to execution on gender-responsive finance. It has also reinforced the importance of embedding these considerations systematically - across our investment processes, our project pipelines and our institutional decision-making. As EBID continues to expand its role in the region's sustainable finance ecosystem, we see this as foundational work, not a one-off initiative.” - Dr Francis G. Ezin, Director of Administration and General Services of the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development (EBID)
From Capacity Building to Market Transformation
The engagement with EBID forms part of UN Women's broader work to strengthen sustainable finance ecosystems across West and Central Africa. The next phase of collaboration will focus on continued technical support, including strengthening institutional frameworks, exploring eligible project pipelines and supporting governance and implementation considerations as appropriate.
UN Women’s ambition is to support the development of financial systems in which gender equality is increasingly embedded in how capital is mobilised, allocated and measured.
As sustainable finance markets across Africa continue to evolve, strengthening institutional capacity will be critical to ensuring that the growth of innovative financing translates into tangible economic opportunities for women.
For UN Women, this means working alongside financial institutions and market actors to help build the capabilities, partnerships and financing approaches needed to move gender-responsive finance from an emerging practice towards a more integrated feature of Africa's sustainable finance ecosystem.
Distributed by APO Group on behalf of UN Women - Africa.
