Meet Marilou van Golstein Brouwers, a former Ladies’s World Banking Board Member and an undoubtedly instrumental determine in founding Ladies’s World Banking Asset Administration (WAM) and managing its first fund.
Investing and making a living doesn’t have to return on the expense of the larger good, and when accomplished correctly, these alternatives can—and will—contribute to a greater world for everybody. However when Marilou van Golstein Brouwers started her profession in non-public banking, she discovered that the 2 paths typically diverged and alternatives to mix these targets have been arduous to search out. “It stunned me that nobody made the hyperlink between their very own values and the way their cash was invested,” she says—that’s, till a son of one in all her shoppers impressed her to maintain searching for investments that will have an effect on significant change. “That was the primary spark, and I grew to become conscious of the steering energy of cash.”
A number of years later, in 1990, she joined Netherlands-based Triodos Financial institution, then in its early days with solely 25 individuals. “It was an ideal alternative to assist construct a values-based financial institution,” Marilou says. There, she helped develop their preliminary influence investing actions, which led to the launch of a subsidiary, Triodos Funding Administration, the place she’d function Managing Director for practically twenty years—though it will nonetheless be greater than 20 years earlier than the time period “influence investing” was formally coined. Again then, she remembers, microfinance simply referred to loans for small entrepreneurs; it wasn’t thought-about one thing to spend money on. Nevertheless, Marilou knew that there was not solely market worth within the means to take a position, however that it is also a catalyst for rising ladies’s financial empowerment.
Following the launch of Triodos Funding Administration, she took a board place with Ladies’s World Banking to assist drive our mission of accelerating ladies’s monetary inclusion all over the world. Marilou’s experience in influence investing helped Ladies’s World Banking impact coverage adjustments in capital markets and industrial banks that have been getting into into microfinance alternatives, whereas additionally working to help our World Community Members as they expanded outreach and merchandise geared towards low-income ladies.
Throughout her practically 10 years on the Ladies’s World Banking board, Marilou proved instrumental within the improvement and founding of Ladies’s World Banking Asset Administration (WAM), our gender lens funding subsidiary that makes fairness investments in inclusive monetary establishments in international rising markets. “In addition to all of the work Ladies’s World Banking was doing in recommendation, advocacy and group constructing, I knew that with the ability to make investments can be useful out there and make a distinction for girls’s financial empowerment.” As soon as she stepped down from the board, she was requested if Triodos Funding Administration can be prepared to behave as co-manager of the primary WAM funding fund. Now, some three a long time later, it’s clear that Marilou’s market foresight was spot on and her early efforts to jumpstart our technique paid off: Affect investing is now well-known, proving social returns needn’t come on the expense of monetary returns. In 2022, WAM closed its second influence fund at $103 million—contributing to a collective 8.5 million ladies prospects served throughout Funds I and II.
Whereas she’s grateful for the enhancements over the previous 20 years, Marilou regrets that there are nonetheless many underserved populations who lack entry to monetary providers. Whether or not it’s a possibility to open a checking account—which in some international locations, remains to be not attainable for girls—or gaining access to capital as a lady founding father of an enterprise. She highlights monetary literacy as one other main impediment for all ladies throughout the socio-economic spectrum, stating that far too many ladies are nonetheless handled by bankers as incapable of creating their very own monetary selections. “It’s undoubtedly not sensible on the a part of the banks as a result of a number of wealth is being transferred to ladies within the years to return,” she says. “Equally it’s clear that low-income ladies are bankable and might be provided monetary providers in a sustainable method.” And it’s these providers that allow individuals, and ladies particularly, to higher handle their day by day lives, to deal with surprising difficulties, and to meet aspirations and plan for the longer term. She reiterates {that a} holistic lens is critical as a result of “all of it begins with inclusion normally, and monetary inclusion for girls particularly.”
Ladies’s World Banking is grateful to have labored with Marilou all through the years and for her inclusive, ahead considering that has each launched and formed applications which have positively impacted ladies all over the world. As Marilou displays on her time with us as a “nice pleasure,” she notes that the ladies she labored with supplied belief, help and empowerment for each other, too. “[The experience] has really enriched my life.” She shares that it’s an ideal level of happiness and satisfaction that achievements in advocating for girls’s financial empowerment have been the results of collaboration, of girls—and males—placing their egos apart to work collectively for a better function. “When ladies thrive, communities thrive. It is so simple as that.”
Ladies’s World Banking has modified the lives of hundreds of thousands of girls, remodeling their households, companies and communities, and driving inclusive progress globally via monetary inclusion.
Immediately, utilizing our subtle market and client analysis, we flip insights into actual motion to design and advocate for coverage engagement, digital monetary options (see Blanca’s story right here), office management applications, and gender lens investing.
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