From Commitment to Action: The 2X Challenge with Jen Braswell | International Women’s Day

In this special International Women’s Day episode, we speak with Jen Braswell, co-founder of the 2X Challenge and Special Advisor to responsAbility.

Jen shares insights into the origins of the 2X Challenge, its role in mobilising capital to advance women’s economic empowerment, and why gender-lens investing is gaining momentum across global markets.

With a long track record in gender-lens investing, responsAbility is proud to join the 2X Challenge and continue expanding investment opportunities that support women as entrepreneurs, employees, consumers and leaders.

Tune in for a conversation on turning commitments into action — and how partnerships between private investors and development finance institutions can help scale impact.

Guest: Jen Braswell, Co-Founder of the 2X Challenge and Impact & Sustainability Advisor to responsAbility

Moderated by: Rachel Dale, responsAbility

Follow responsAbility on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/responsability-investments

https://www.responsability.com/

#InternationalWomensDay #GenderLensInvesting #2XChallenge

Transcript

Welcome to Voices of Impact Investing, the responsAbility Investments Podcast. There is a huge opportunity when women do have access to capital, when they do have support as business leaders, they make great decisions for women in their businesses, for women as consumers of their products, and for women in their supply chains. Something like 28 trillion currently is not being injected into the global economy because of this exclusion factor of women in the private sector. So if we can actively bring women in, we will close that gap significantly.

Jen Braswell is a leading voice in gender lens investing and inclusive finance. She is the co-founder of the 2x Challenge, a global initiative that mobilizes capital to advance women's economic empowerment through investment. To mark International Women's Day, Rachel Dale sat down with Jen to discuss responsAbility's commitment to gender equality through joining the 2x Challenge and what this means for expanding opportunities for women around the world.

Jen, it's great to have you with us today. Delighted to be here. To start with, could you tell us a bit about the origins of the 2x Challenge and why it's an important initiative for advancing gender equality?

So the 2x challenge started in 2018, and it first came from the mind and the passion of the inimitable Suzanne Beagle, who was the first driving force to help to galvanize a lot of investors around the idea that investing with a gender lens, meaning taking women into consideration when making investments, is smart investment decision making. And so in 2018, the Canadian government announced

helped to launch a call to action, which the DFIs of the G7 took up at the G7 meeting in 2018 to announce that a target of $3 billion was set to try to mobilize capital into investments that meaningfully support women.

And since that time, over $33 billion has been mobilized in 2x qualified investments, which is just astounding. And so in 2024, the second 2x challenge was created. And that's where we are today. We are just in the middle stages of this new $20 billion call to action. And I'm so excited that responsAbility has decided to join.

And responsAbility's role in the 2x challenge. Could you explain a bit about what it means for responsAbility to join the challenge?

So what it means is responsAbility is doubling down on its gender lens investing commitments. It means that it is now ready to report the commitments openly to the 2x challenge so that they are counted and become part of this mobilization figure. And it also means that responsAbility is really not moving away in any way from its commitments to ensuring that where and how women participate in its investments are a key part of how it thinks about investing.

Very good. And I know we're excited to be part of it. Could you, from your experience, tell us a bit about how, in practical terms, the 2x Challenge benefits women in underserved communities?

Yeah. So as we know, there are a lot of gaps that women face and a lot of challenges. And many of those gaps are related to capital. They're related to access to finance because often women don't have the collateral or the ability to access credit or access capital. They are often facing challenges with bias as business owners, right?

On the other side of that, there is a huge opportunity because when women do have access to capital, when they do have support as business leaders, they make great decisions for women in their businesses, for women as consumers of their products, and for women in their supply chains. So if we think about investing in women in leadership, we have a cascade effect in terms of women's

opportunities and improve livelihoods overall. And then that has a further cascade effect because women tend to reinvest in their families and their communities. And so as the number goes, it's something like $28 trillion currently is not being injected into the global economy because of this exclusion factor of women in the private sector. So if we can

actively bring women in, we will close that gap significantly. Can you talk more about the exclusion of women in the private sector? Why do they get excluded? And how can the 2x challenge help onboard them? Yeah, so I mean, it's different in different contexts. There's some cultural reasons why women are excluded. But I think

It's because women traditionally have not been part of building the current system as it stands now over the past decades. And so coming in is a little bit more difficult, particularly in certain places. And so what the 2x challenge does is it helps to code the capital that is being invested, allocated and invested into investments in primarily emerging markets towards investments that are

particularly and intentionally supporting women in those businesses, whether they be owned and led by a woman or whether they be participating as workforce or as consumers. I see. Okay. And we, through our investments, have seen examples of this, how you invest in a women's community and how that money gets put back into education and bringing up their children and so on. Have you also had some firsthand experience of seeing an investment make a difference in a community? Yes.

Absolutely. I mean, we have lots of examples. And in fact, I'm just going to give a little shout out because I am on the board of 2x Global, which is the membership organization that emerged out of the 2x Challenge. And there's a whole wealth of information there on the website. But there is one particular investment that I find super interesting because it sits in this place of

An investment that has scaled and has potential to scale more is a company called iMerit, which was founded by a woman founder and CEO who started the company in 2012, specifically with the goal to create a tech

and early AI-focused digital business that was targeting underserved workforce, particularly women, in rural areas to bring them into the digital economy by helping to improve skills and help them to have access to jobs that they wouldn't have been able to have access to in an alternative circumstance. And I have to say, it has been a huge project

example and success story of how a company with this kind of a vision can scale and really build a business model that makes an enormous amount of sense and can actually jump on the bandwagon of significant sectoral growth.

And I have to say it's one of my favorite examples because the numbers of women who have been able to build skills that will serve them throughout their working life and who have been able to lift themselves out of poverty in rural areas through the function and structure of this company is just phenomenal.

That's amazing to have that vision and to really make it happen and affect the lives of so many women. Thank you. It's wonderful. And looking ahead, how do you think investors can play a role in accelerating progress towards gender equality?

So I think there is a real need to be intentional still, because I think it's easy to assume that thinking about where and how women participate in businesses is really not needed anymore because there are so much more opportunities in a lot of the world. But frankly, even in the developed markets, if you still look at the numbers of representation in corporates,

There's a need to think more deeply about why there isn't higher representation for women. And certainly if you're looking at companies in emerging markets, those numbers are even lower and the barriers are even higher. So as an investor, as a capital allocator, I think it's really important to ensure that you are...

asking those that are developing products for managing your capital to ensure that they are very clearly and intentionally investing with a gender lens, which it can be done rather easily using the 2x criteria, which is the framework that has been set out and agreed as the global standard for gender lens investing. Okay, very good. And investors sometimes

They lean forward into this, they believe it, but they're not. How do you convince people it's good business sense as well as the right thing to do for impact to invest with the gentle limbs? Yeah, the business case is pretty clear and it's been out there for, I mean, decades now. And I think, you know, you can look at different

types of investments and think through what the business case is in that type of investment. So, for example, we know that fund, private equity funds in emerging markets, there's an IFC study in 2019 that showed that there was a 10 to 20 percent higher IRR for those funds that had gender balance in the investment teams.

So in terms of investment decision making, the business case is there. In terms of performance at a corporate level, we know that women in workforce tend to have less attrition. We know that there are stronger...

performance in many companies that have a higher level of women in the workforce. As I mentioned before, we know women in leadership are making differentiated kinds of decisions that are supportive of differentiated types of workforce, which reach wider groups and tend to have a more balanced business model. And then if you look at women as borrowers of capital or finance, we know that they are typically

higher in terms of their repayments to those loans. So, I mean, the business case is multi-layered and it's kind of ever-present.

It's so compelling. And talking to you is so convincing. You really convinced me of not only the impact, but the business case behind gender lens investing. And just finally, we're celebrating International Women's Day. What gives you hope as you look to our progress in empowering women in emerging markets? It gives me hope that the membership of 2x Global continues to grow. Interest in

How to invest with a gender lens is still, there's still momentum behind it. We have seen headwinds in this space for sure in the last year or so. But I think that the business case does speak for itself. And investors are realizing that this is actually a pretty smart tool for thinking about how to create value and really drive business models that are going to help their portfolios succeed. So I'm hopeful. I am hopeful.

Jen, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your insights. It's really inspiring to hear how initiatives like the 2x Challenge are helping mobilise capital to support women's economic empowerment.

We're proud that responsAbility is part of this effort and it's especially fitting to discuss it as we're marking International Women's Day. Thank you again for being with us. My pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you. Don't forget to subscribe to the Voices of Impact Investing podcast to stay updated on new episodes available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and follow us on LinkedIn at responsAbility Investments. You'll find the link in our show notes.

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