Acting for greater equality

The private sector plays a key role in reducing gender inequalities by promoting professional opportunities and female entrepreneurship, and improving access to essential goods and services for women and girls. In phase with France's feminist diplomacy strategy and the objectives of AFD Group, Proparco helps the businesses it supports to identify and prevent gender inequality, both in-house and among their customers.

The 2X Challenge to support the socio-economic empowerment of women

In 2018, the development finance institutions of the G7 countries – which include Proparco – launched the 2X Challenge. It aims to get the private sector to contribute to the development of women as entrepreneurs, business leaders and employees, and ensure that they can have equitable access to goods and services.

The financiers' approach is twofold: factoring in the risk of maintaining or reinforcing gender inequalities in the projects they finance, and consciously increasing the share of financing that benefits female entrepreneurs, employees and investors. 

A risk-based approach to combating gender inequality

Proparco has developed a risk-based approach to ensure that the businesses it supports comply with international standards, particularly in terms of gender equality. This encourages them to incorporate gender equality commitments into their internal policies. 

In 2023, Proparco devised a dedicated approach to preventing gender-based violence (GBV) to improve how it is assesed, prevented, monitoring, reporting and management in financing and investment projects. 

Gender-based technical support

Thanks to the non-financial support it provides, Proparco meets the needs of its clients – both businesses or financial institutions – by mobilising expertise to assess internal practices, design gender-specific action plans or develop “product” offerings that promote financial inclusion or access to services for women. 

The Covid-19 pandemic triggered the sharpest increase in inequality in three decades. Inequality within countries has increased to such an extent that it has become the main component of global inequality. By 2030, more than 600 million people, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, are expected to still be living in extreme poverty.

As a provider of jobs and essential goods and services, the private sector has a crucial role to play in reducing socio-economic and regional inequalities by investing more in health, education, energy and microfinance and targeting vulnerable communities.

The ‘Equality & Inclusion’ approach

Proparco seeks to ensure that everyone, particularly poor or marginalised populations, can participate in and access the benefits and opportunities generated by its financing.

The inclusion of poor or marginalised populations – and more specifically, targeting populations from the Bottom 40 (B40 – representing the bottom 40% of household incomes in a given country) – is the selected means of action for reducing inequalities within countries. Funding is therefore analysed according to three criteria that determine whether it contributes to:

• Providing access to essential goods and services for poor or marginalised populations
• Developing virtuous agriculture value chains that include smallholder farmers
• Financing companies operating in disadvantaged regions (at country level)