11th Gender Leadership Award - Ensuring Prosperity for All

[Shibani Pandey]
The Gender Leadership Award recognizes leaders who have a proven track record of advancing gender equality in business while advancing the World Bank Group's mission of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity on a livable planet.

Today, just 49% of women aged 15 and older participate in the global labor force, and just a third of women are owners of formal businesses worldwide. These figures represent an enormous, largely untapped opportunity. In fact, the global economy could gain five to six trillion dollars if women were to start and scale new businesses at the same rate as men.

This is why this year's theme for the award, Investing in Women, Transforming Economies, Generating Jobs, resonates so powerfully. Today, we are delighted to be recognizing an eminent leader who truly embodies this vision: Katarina Zdraljevic, Head of Group Sustainability at ProCredit Holding, a global bank headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany.

ProCredit is a long-standing MIGA and IFC client, and Katarina's work is a powerful example of how financial institutions can support women entrepreneurs to thrive and make an impact more broadly.

Now, on to the program lined up for today. We will begin with remarks from Tsutomu Yamamoto, MIGA's Managing Director, followed by a keynote speech by Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed, World Bank Group Executive Director for Angola, Nigeria, and South Africa.

After the presentation of the award, we will hear from our awardee, Katarina herself, and then we'll move into a panel discussion moderated by Ed Mountfield, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at MIGA. To close out today's program, we invite you to join us for a reception just across the hall.

Now, on to today's program. Before we begin, just a quick housekeeping note. We are streaming live on World Bank Live, so a warm welcome once again to all our online participants. If you'd like to tweet or share something about the event, we encourage you to do so by using the hashtag Accelerate Equality.

We also have our in-house gender expert, Satsuki Nakajima, who is available to answer your questions in real time on World Bank Live.

With that, it is now my great pleasure to invite Tsutomu Yamamoto, MIGA's Managing Director, to the stage. Tsutomu, the floor is yours.

[Tsutomu Yamamoto]
Good morning. Good morning, everyone.

On behalf of MIGA and the World Bank Group guarantee platform, welcome, and thank you for joining us for the 11th Annual Gender Leadership Award. This is my first time hosting this event as MIGA's Managing Director, and I have to say it is a privilege, not only in the spirit of International Women's Day, which we marked last week, but because of what this award represents.

For 11 years, MIGA has used this event to say clearly and publicly that gender equality is not a marginal concern. It is central to our development mission and ensuring prospects for all.

Why does gender equality matter to the World Bank Group? I think the answer comes down to three Cs.

First, constraints.

The barriers facing women entrepreneurs are not gaps in talent or ambition. They are structural: a financing gap of nearly $1.7 trillion, collateral requirements built around assets women often do not own, and financial systems that were not designed with them in mind. Removing these constraints is not just the right thing to do. It is essential to unlocking the full potential of the private sector in the markets we serve.

Second, champions.

Structural change does not happen on its own. It requires leaders within institutions, within industries, who make gender inclusion a deliberate and sustained priority. People who push past resistance, redesign products, reshape cultures, and refuse to accept the status quo.

Third, commitments.

Real progress requires staying the course across markets, across years, across partnerships. The World Bank Group cannot do this alone. It takes a shared commitment between guarantee providers, financial institutions, and private sector actors, between multilateral banks as a whole and their clients, who put these values into practice every day.

This year's awardee, Katarina Zdraljevic of ProCredit Holding, addresses each of the three Cs.

Through her leadership, ProCredit has worked to dismantle the constraints that block women entrepreneurs from accessing financing, directing 20% of its loan disbursements to female entrepreneurs and designing products that remove collateral barriers.

She is a champion, leading by example, building inclusive institutions from the inside, creating a workforce where women lead at every level.

She represents exactly the kind of commitment that multiplies impact. MIGA has been proud to be a partner in that journey. ProCredit is a long-term partner of the World Bank Group as a whole, with a deep and enduring relationship with both MIGA and IFC.

That breadth of partnership matters. It means when we talk about the World Bank Group's commitment to gender equality, we are not talking about a single transaction or a single installment. We are talking about a sustained institution-wide effort, one that Katarina and ProCredit have chosen to be part of year after year, market after market.

Before we hear from our keynote speakers, I would like to invite you to watch a short video message about this year's awardee, Katarina, and ProCredit Holding's commitment to inclusive finance across multiple markets. In her words, she will share what this work means to her and why it matters. I think you will find it both inspiring and grounding.

Thank you very much. Now, please enjoy the video.

[Video featuring Katarina Zdraljevic]
When women succeed, whole economies become more resilient. Women are enabling jobs, providing economic growth, and supporting social and environmental sustainability through their businesses.

My name is Katarina Zdraljevic, and I work as Head of Group Sustainability at ProCredit Holding.

I'm working on two main strategies: decarbonization and climate action, and inclusive finance, where we are tackling the topic of gender equity and inclusion.

By identifying the obstacles female entrepreneurs are facing in our countries of operation, we can develop adequate financial and non-financial services that will help them move forward. For us at ProCredit, it's really important to understand their needs and the obstacles they are facing. This is one of the main starting points for all our strategies.

We have been working with MIGA on our gender action plan since 2023, and we have really had a great cooperation which has brought a meaningful structure to our approach. This plan had several main topics that we covered, from leadership, internal trainings, and internal alignment, through identification of benchmarks on the market, but also our internal benchmarks.

[Jovanka Joleska Popovska]
Katarina was very important in the process of development of the gender action plan. She believed that in order to develop this, we need to live it and believe it. She was the initiator of making the gender-focused topic part of our regular yearly session of the code of conduct that all our employees are involved in.

[Katarina Zdraljevic]
We have provided trainings to all staff in order to understand what obstacles women are facing, to understand our unconscious bias, and to see how we as an institution can support them from any position that we hold.

Working with MIGA has really been crucial in order to have this successful approach, to bring it from individual initiatives to a structured group approach.

For us at ProCredit, 53% of managerial roles at ProCredit Group are held by women, and this is really important for us as an impact- and development-oriented bank.

[Jovanka Joleska Popovska]
The women in leadership at ProCredit did not emerge overnight. Neither are they the product of quotas. They are the product of equal and merit-based selection processes, as well as the overall internal development system, such as the management academy, that really provides equal opportunities to everybody.

I’ve known Katarina for more than 10 years. She was then a freshly graduated engineer. Together with colleagues, they developed a program for children and working mothers in the cocoa and coffee bean sector in Nicaragua. Already then, that was the first initiative and sense of connecting business practices with social impact.

[Katarina Zdraljevic]
Women are facing many hurdles in their everyday business. Women are better educated in our countries of operation. However, they have less representation in entrepreneurship and in employment.

We at ProCredit are working to support our customers to overcome those obstacles. Working in the financial industry now for almost 15 years, of course I have had many challenges, from clients who would rather talk to a male counterpart than a female. Especially when I was younger, it was really deeply affecting me. However, through the network of support that we have internally and fair opportunities to grow and develop my skills, I have managed to overcome this.

I think this is really crucial for all women working in this segment. We just need a fair chance. We need a fair opportunity. If we are given this and support, we can show that we are equally capable as anyone else working in this industry.

[Shibani Pandey]
Thank you, Tsutomu, for your inspiring remarks, and Katarina, what a fascinating video that was. Congratulations once again, and thank you for inspiring us with your amazing work.

Now I'd like to invite Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed, World Bank Group Executive Director representing Angola, Nigeria, and South Africa, to the stage for our keynote speech.

Also, just a quick note: following Zainab's remarks, we will have Tsutomu present the Gender Leadership Award to Katarina.

[Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed]
Good morning, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. Special greetings to Katherina. Welcome to DC, and congratulations on this award.

On behalf of the World Bank Group Board, where I represent Angola, Nigeria, and South Africa, I am pleased to join you for this 11th Annual Gender Leadership Award celebration.

International Women's Day is usually a moment to celebrate progress, but it is also a moment to assess how much further we must go, and to recommit ourselves to getting there.

This award gives us a chance to come together and show, beyond policy statements, why gender equality is important and why it should matter to everyone who is here and people who are not here today.

I remember how, in 2019 in Nigeria, we celebrated International Women's Day with a theme at that time, Investing for Equality, very similar to the theme that we have here today. We called on governments at various levels to evolve programs aimed at empowering Nigerian women.

Gender equality is not simply a women's issue. It is an economic issue. It is a security issue. It is a climate issue. It is also a generational issue.

When girls stay in school longer, their children are healthier and better educated. When women lead, institutions are more accountable and more resilient. When women are economically empowered, entire communities rise along with them.

As the World Bank Group estimated this year, closing the gender gap could increase global GDP by as much as 20%. Looking further ahead, UN Women projects that accelerating progress on gender equality could generate a cumulative 342 trillion US dollars by the year 2050, which would be a great boost to the global economy.

Women also are peacemakers. When women participate in peace negotiations, agreements are 35% more likely to be reached than when they do not. And when they are reached, they are more likely to last. Women are also investors in the future. When women control family budgets, scarce resources are often directed to children's health as well as education.

Women are climate dependent, and I see Katherine is one strong one, because every increase in gender equality strengthens a country's capacity to adapt to climate change.

Women, in short, are the single greatest unutilized resource in the global development toolkit.

And yet, despite this evidence, the world is currently on track to miss every single target under Sustainable Development Goal number five, the global commitment to gender equality, by the year 2030.

Across Africa, women face several challenges. We still face laws and customs that prevent us from owning land, accessing credit, or making basic decisions about our economic lives. According to OECD estimates, these barriers suppress Africa's GDP by as much as 7.5% every year. Closing this gap could add 1 trillion US dollars to Africa's GDP by the year 2043 and lift 80 million people out of extreme poverty.

But there is also a powerful story of progress.

During my tenure as Minister of Finance in Nigeria, we noted that Nigeria must have a stronger and more inclusive economy. It is crucial that we take a long-term and strategic approach to ensuring that women are economically empowered. We therefore prioritized gender-responsive budgeting and comprehensive gender mainstreaming in fiscal policy and public financial management to address some of the constraints that were identified.

We advanced gender lenses in national budgets, assessed the gender responsiveness of fiscal interventions, including stimulus packages during the COVID-19 period and at other times when we had to use stimulus packages, and also supported targeted programs to expand access to financing and capacity building for women-owned MSME businesses.

We set up some programs, one of which we called the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Program, as well as an MSME Survival Fund, initiatives that were targeted at MSME growth and protection, especially during COVID. A large proportion of the MSMEs are actually owned by women.

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of female entrepreneurship activity in the world today. About 26% of women are starting or running businesses. Women account for a significant share of Africa's agricultural labor, even though they own only 12% of the land. Women's financial account ownership has more than doubled since 2011, reaching 52% by 2024, largely driven by mobile money, a revolution that has really taken strong ground on the African continent. Women's representation in parliament across Sub-Saharan Africa has also been improving, albeit very slowly, especially in my country, Nigeria.

We particularly advocated for women in leadership positions, both in government as well as in the private sector.

The ambition exists across the African continent and also other regions of the world. In every market and every community, there are women ready to lead, ready to build, and ready to transform. All they require is an opportunity to do so.

The evidence is clear. What truly makes a difference in leadership is the willingness to act. That is precisely what we are recognizing today.

Katrina Zeraveveltic has helped build an institution where gender inclusion is not an add-on. It is a core principle. Her work shows that when financial institutions commit to serving women, business performance does not suffer. It actually improves.

This award today acknowledges Katrina's personal commitment to this agenda as well as her company, ProCredit, for being an exemplary lending institution that has placed a premium on equality.

It is my privilege to congratulate Katherina, this year's winner of the Gender Leadership Award, and to invite her to the podium. Before she makes her remarks, I also want to ask Tsutomu to join me on the podium so that the commemorative gifts can be presented to Katherina.

[Katarina Zdraljevic]
Thank you all for being here.
It is really a big honor, and I cannot thank you enough, on behalf of myself but also on behalf of the company, ProCredit Holding.

I am really deeply honored to receive this year's 2026 Gender Leadership Award, and my sincere thanks to MIGA and the World Bank Group for this recognition, and even more importantly for the support in developing the gender action plan that we have been working on together.

This plan has been a cornerstone in strengthening our internal systems and data, market approach, and also gender inclusion with our clients. Your guidance has helped us a lot to turn this into structure and structure into real impact. So thank you so much for the award and for your constant support in our work.

Globally, we still face a lot of inequalities, and we have a long way to go. In 2025, according to the Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forum, there is still 68.8% of the gender gap. That means that only 68.8% of women have access to the same privileges, opportunities, and economic prospects that men have. That means that, at the current pace, we can achieve full parity only in 123 years, which is quite a lot, you would agree.

This is not only a question of fairness. I think it was already mentioned before. It is a question of jobs, economic growth, and long-term prosperity and sustainability. When women participate fully in the economy, they create businesses that employ others, invest in their communities, and drive sustainability and productivity across all systems and sectors.

The situation is not different in our countries of operation. ProCredit Group operates in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, and the story is pretty much similar. Women entrepreneurs are ambitious, skilled, and innovative, but often face a lot of persistent structural barriers.

They lack collateral, as mentioned, due to inheritance practices. They have limited ownership of land and productive assets. They have gaps in financial literacy and access to information that helps them make good business decisions. They also have limited access to financial services due to the lack of starting capital. These are all system-based issues, not individual shortcomings of women.

These are the reasons why many capable women say, "I can grow my business, but I cannot meet requirements of the bank." This is the strongest explanation why most women-led businesses are in the micro and lower small segment, and they cannot grow their businesses.

However, there are also positive examples. One of them is our client from Georgia, Maka Makataj, who founded the IT academy called STEPP in 2016. She brought global IT education to the local market in Georgia, which is a field that has historically been heavily dominated by men. With our support from ProCredit, she has been investing in energy-efficient buildings, premises, and equipment in order to scale her academy and have more students studying in this STEM sector. But what is most important, she has enabled many young women and girls to access this kind of education and to enroll in the STEM sector.

This is one of the real impacts that the financial sector can have: real stories. That is what inclusive finance looks like. Targeted support that enables women entrepreneurs to drive growth, innovation, sustainable practices, and new job opportunities for all.

This is not a long story and not a unique story. We are working across all countries to reach more inclusion and support more customers. We have several different stories, and I will not mention all of them because we work in each one of the countries, but maybe worth mentioning are our business academies in North Macedonia, programs against violence against women really strongly focused on Ecuador, programs against violence then programs [to] empower [women] in Georgia and program to support [them] to get started with [their] business in Serbia.

These are just some of the programs that we are working on consistently in different countries in order to support women, and each one of those initiatives has been a product of our gender action plan, which was developed with strong support from MIGA and which gave us a framework to act systematically and consistently throughout the group.

Generally, the financial industry is uniquely positioned to remove many barriers that women face. But how exactly can we do it?

We can remove collateral barriers and focus more on cash-based models for lending. We can recognize informal income and different business cycles. We can offer products that are tailored to women-led micro and MSMEs, embed non-financial services, which are really important especially in some of the segments that are not addressed, and finally we must ensure that our staff understands women and understands the unconscious bias that can affect our business.

When we implement all of those aspects, we do not only advance equality, we are opening one of the most promising growth markets that exists currently. I think it was already mentioned by Zainab that global GDP can grow by 20%.

One more time, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to MIGA and to the whole team. This recognition belongs equally to all my colleagues, not only to me and to all our staff.

[Ed Mountfield]
We also want to use this event
to promote wider conversations about things that matter. It is a pleasure and a privilege to moderate today's panel discussion.

Let me briefly set the stage. Today's panel is titled From Financial Inclusion to Job Creation: What Works, What's Missing, and What's Next. Expanding women's access to finance has been a growing priority for the World Bank Group and for the development community, and efforts are bearing fruit. But getting women into formal financial systems is really only the first part of the journey. What happens next, whether their businesses survive, whether they grow, whether they create jobs, is where the harder work begins.

That is what this panel is here to explore.

Our panelists today represent three different vantage points on this journey: the frontline bank, the wholesale national development bank, and the global multilateral institution. Our goal is to draw out some insights, surface some missing links, and explore what it will take to move the needle from inclusion as a first step to lasting impact.

Let me briefly introduce the panel. Katarina Zdraljevic needs no further introduction. She is Head of Group Sustainability at ProCredit Holding, the person we are here to celebrate today.

Theresa Lawal is Head of Product Development and Strategic Alliances at the Development Bank of Nigeria, or DBN, where she leads partnerships, specialized products, and gender-focused initiatives to expand access to finance for underserved MSMEs.

DBN is a relatively young development bank, and what makes it distinctive is its wholesale model, something we will hear about more in our discussion.

Robin M. is Global Director of Gender at the World Bank Group. Robin brings a multilateral knowledge-bank lens to today's discussion and will help us map some of the structural barriers and connect some of the dots between the challenges that we face and the solutions that the World Bank Group's new gender strategy points towards. [possible hallucination: surname omitted in source]

Theresa, let me start with you, if you don't mind. In her acceptance speech just now, Katarina highlighted the structural barriers that many women entrepreneurs face, and as she put it, "I can run the business, but I can't manage the bank's requirements."

These challenges are real from the very first step of gaining access to formal financial systems. DBN was established by the Nigerian government with support from the World Bank and other partners to tackle barriers like this.

Can you talk a little bit about, in terms of women's economic empowerment, what problem DBN is working to solve, and what is the logic behind the approach DBN has chosen of working through partner financial institutions?

[Theresa Lawal]
Thank you.

DBN was set up really to support MSMEs by bridging the financing gaps, but with particular focus on underserved segments, of which women are one.

The idea behind the wholesale model really is understanding that, as a development finance institution, a lot of the impact will be felt through collaborations, through partnerships with the banks, catalyzing and mobilizing capital in the private sector, just so that there is more financing available to bridge that gap.

A lot of the challenges that women in Nigeria face, there are the social aspects, there are the traditional aspects, the whole nine yards. I think people before me have spoken to it, and I would not really necessarily want to go into that a lot. But first, the funding is not there. In the cases where the funding is there, the products are not there. They are not tailored to their specific needs.

Women in Nigeria particularly are not able to step up their business past maybe a small mom-and-pop type business, and that is really not the idea. In terms of contribution, they contribute a lot, and in terms of numbers and value, it is important that we give that support to women so they can contribute more.

At the end of the day, we are looking at empowerment, prosperity for all. If you empower women, you empower the family, you empower a community, and you empower a nation.

Besides this, we have also seen that women are more responsible. There is a business case there, no offense, but in terms of repayment, in terms of the way they manage the funds, men will typically take a million dollars. A woman may probably take ten thousand. What she does with that money, the number of times she turns it around, the impact is unimaginable.

I would not really go into all of that. I think we all know that. But I think DBN really wants to see how we can empower women so that they can contribute more at that level, and so that they can also really move the needle.

We also see it as collective action. So we are doing that. We are leading, but we cannot do it alone, and that is why we are supporting the banks as well, just so that everyone is on board. We are supporting with so many things: gender action plans, strategies, products, co-creating, providing the funding, and so much more.

At the end of the day, we want everyone to be at that table to empower women.

Ed Mountfield – Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, MIGA

Thank you very much, Theresa.

That is a very vivid portrait of why we need to bring women entrepreneurs into the formal financial system and what it will take.

Turning to Robin, when the question becomes not just access but turning that access into jobs, how do we think about that next step? Maybe you can help us frame that next step of the process.

[Robin Mearns]
Thanks very much for the question, Ed, and really it is an honor and a privilege to be here as part of this event and this distinguished panel. Congratulations again, Katarina.

I think that is the key question, Ed. We often talk about women's financial inclusion and job creation as if they were somehow part of a single linear journey, as though once a woman entrepreneur actually gains access to finance, growth and jobs are naturally going to follow. But actually, in reality, they are related challenges, of course, but they are not quite the same problem.

Yes, when we move beyond access and we focus on business growth and job creation, the picture changes. I think it is really important to approach these interconnected issues with an accurate framing, as you say.

Theresa has just illustrated this beautifully. Financial access fundamentally is about entry, how women entrepreneurs first connect into the formal financial system, overcoming some of the initial barriers that keep them out of that system.

But growth and job creation is about something different. It is really about whether businesses are able to invest and scale and manage risk and compete over time. So the constraints, the incentives, and the policy levers at different steps along that journey are not identical.

Let me just start with the access side. As many know here, under the World Bank Group gender strategy, we have three bold, ambitious, measurable targets. One of them is around access to capital, access for an additional 80 million women and women-led businesses by 2030.

This ambition, this goal, is grounded in a very clear diagnosis. Across emerging markets, women-led MSMEs face a very significant financing gap, and it is driven by structural barriers, and we have heard about that in the keynote speeches today: limited collateral, because women are much less likely to own property; discriminatory legal frameworks, as our new issue of the Women, Business and the Law report highlights very clearly; biases in credit and investment decisions; and persistent data gaps that make women-led firms much less visible to financial institutions.

So on the access side, the work, as Tsutomu explained at the beginning, is really about removing those barriers through legal reforms, innovative instruments such as gender bonds, guarantees, digital credit, and changes in how financial institutions actually assess risk and design products and services to remove some of the barriers to women-led enterprises.

But that is where the picture begins to shift. When we move from access to growth, we are asking a different question. It is not so much just, is the woman in the financial system? It is, is her business actually growing and creating jobs?

Access to capital is vital. It is necessary, but it is not sufficient.

Women-led businesses also face a whole bundle of constraints, not just a single constraint. There are gaps in human capital and management experience. Women may have smaller, less business-oriented networks, limited market information, perhaps concentration in lower-productivity sectors, and there is the persistent double burden of unpaid care work laid on top of all that.

Women globally spend three times as much time as men do on unpaid care work, and that directly limits the time and the energy that they can devote to scaling their businesses.

So in practice, what works is a whole set of bundled solutions: solutions that bring together financing, skills, mentoring, peer networks, and markets. When we see those levers moving together, we see not just inclusion but actually real business growth.

Just to summarize, financial inclusion is the key entry point, but job creation requires a whole set of things and a much wider ecosystem of actions that determine whether or not women-led businesses can actually grow and reach scale.

Ed Mountfield – Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, MIGA

Thanks, Robin.

Turning to the star of the show, Katarina, Robin has just made an important point that capital alone is not enough and that we need bundled solutions.

During your speech, you talked about some of the challenges in getting women into the financial system. Can you give us a little bit more of your perspective on the specific challenges that women face in scaling their businesses and making them succeed? What approaches has ProCredit Holding been able to champion that have made a difference in moving from inclusion to jobs and success?

[Katarina Zdraljevic]
Yes, sure.

I would like to focus on three main points. I think everything was really well explained by Theresa and Robin.

The first one is access to scale capital, the first restraint, which is the collateral problem.

The second one is unpaid work and limited time constraints that women have in order to prosper.

The third one is more related to the absence of a holistic support system that women have in general.

I will focus on how we overcome those, because I think they were already very well explained.

So first was access to scale capital. We have seen that, due to the lack of assets, women could access finance but in smaller amounts. Theresa already mentioned this. While men would take bigger-ticket loans, women could access only smaller ones, which then caused slower growth of their businesses. There we have proved that most women-led businesses are in micro and lower small segments, and this is one of the obstacles that we tried to solve through the use of risk-sharing facilities and collateral schemes, which have been a really important tool for us in supporting women-led businesses in scaling up and growing their businesses.

This really helped us as a company, but also our customers, to overcome that barrier.

Then the second one: time constraints and unpaid domestic work, which is many times not really perceived as such because it is somehow considered given by chance and just taken for granted. But actually this also has an economic price because women cannot establish networks, cannot participate in different events, and cannot reach opportunities that could be presented during those events.

As a company, we are organizing business meetings and different trainings that women can attend, which does not solve this time constraint, but still we have flexibility in many different time slots. However, we have also designed a digital online platform called Procon, where our clients are participating throughout all 12 countries. Therefore, each client, including women-led businesses, can network with other companies from the same sector or from other sectors. They can look for suppliers. They can look for clients. They can reach different markets. At the same time, we provide them content that serves them to improve their business, to learn, and to scale up. This is self-paced. They can access it whenever they have time, and we overcome this constraint.

Then the third one was the holistic support system that they are missing. Sometimes, yes, it is needed to come and have access to a loan, but I think this is not enough. In all market studies that we have seen and all feedback that we had from our female clients and women-led businesses, they also need further support and an advisory role from financial institutions.

Yes, we can sell the loan. We can give a 1 million loan. But is this something that this business exactly needs in this moment? Is this something that will help them grow, create more jobs, and create more productivity?

In this sense, our approach towards MSMEs has been crucial in general as a company because we are focusing on an advisory role. Our colleagues working directly with clients are called client advisors, not loan officers. Therefore, we are investing heavily in training all our colleagues in order to provide this adequate advisory role, and women really appreciate this.

[Ed Mountfield]
Thank you, Katarina.

Turning to Theresa, as you know, I was recently in Lagos, where DBN is based, and I had a chance to hear from women small and medium enterprise owners about the frustrations that they felt. They felt that they were able sometimes to get access to small financing from banks, but that they were not always getting the support they needed to grow successful businesses.

As you think about the same context and the same challenge that Karina has just spoken about in the context of Nigeria, what does a next phase look like for DBN? How are you thinking about helping to scale the support to women to allow their businesses to grow and thrive?

[Theresa Lawal]
Thank you for that question.

Just to give a bit of background, for DBN, in terms of the funding that has been deployed in the private market, it is circa about a billion dollars. Out of that, we have been intentional about deploying funding to women, and I am proud to say that about 77% of that has gone to women in terms of count. In terms of volume, we are looking to move the needle a bit further.

There is the funding that has been provided, but it is a whole ecosystem of support through our wholly owned subsidiary as well, where collateral constraints are the major issue. The guarantee company kicks in to provide risk-sharing guarantees to support lending to women. Where typically for the MSMEs it is about 60% coverage, for women we have upped this to 75%. So it is a whopping 75%. They really do not have that much of a challenge.

We also catalyzed what we call our National Collateral Registry. That is leveraging movable assets and trying to be creative about the other things that we can take from women so that banks can actually begin to look at alternative instruments to support women, outside of the traditional "what property do you have, what assets do you have." They are more innovative about thinking about this.

Moving out of that, we realized we are doing a lot of support in terms of technical assistance, capacity building, working both on the demand side and on the supply side. On the demand side, it is really helping the bankability of the women.

We found, however, that a lot of women have received training, both in the classroom and online. We have an app similar to this called the BizAid app. So they have the tools there. But many of them really are not able to access formal credit to grow.

So we thought there is also the need to give grants, and this is just a little catalytic, so that you are able to move them from where they are, they are able to build capital, they are able to grow their business, and then they are in that space where the banks begin to see them and can provide them with the formal credit that they require.

Outside of this also, there is now supporting the banks with alternative credit-scoring tools and with technical assistance. Recently we got approval with the World Bank for a $500 million program called FINID.

FINID is looking at things innovatively, outside of the typical tools that we have, the whole funding, technical assistance, and things like that, but really trying to look at other systems, other tools, other platforms where MSMEs are impacted.

In terms of funding, you are looking at the likes of fintech, supply chain finance, and even financial NGOs who are at the grassroots and really are close to the women in agriculture, for example. You want to support all this, and the funding is largely subordinated so that at least you are able to get more of the banks to come in place, they blend their capital, and they are able to do more to support the women.

While it is really for MSMEs, women have 30%, so we have that focus to say at least 30% of it should go to women. So this is about $100 million.

We are not just looking at the numbers now. We are looking at the value of funding that women have.

Backing up off that as well, we are looking at the capital markets. I talked about grants, we are talking about loans. Many times women are not able to access credit because they do not have the capital that they need. So we need to start looking at how we can be innovative about playing in the capital market space, supporting women at that level.

Many times you are thinking about assets and raising capital for bigger growth-stage companies. Sometimes you could do a bit more at the MSME stage where women can grow, and this is some of the vision that we have.

I would not want to speak too much, but there is really a lot. We have a tool which is also supposed to help support this. It is called an impact credit-scoring model. What that model is supposed to do is, yes, we want to support women, but if I have a dollar to give and I am able to leverage on the indices, there is probably more impact in supporting women in a certain location over another. We have the figures. We have the data.

So what this tool is supposed to do also is measure the real impact of funding to inform so many things, pre-disbursement and post-disbursement, and to inform more of the decisions that financial institutions are making to support women.

So there is a business case and there is a track record. I will stop here so I do not take up all the time. There is a lot more to do in terms of guarantees to support all this innovation and all the support that women can actually get.

[Ed Mountfield]
Thank you very much, Theresa.

We are running close to time, but I want to hear from Robin and Katarina as well. So Robin, we have heard from Katarina and Theresa some strategies to help women entrepreneurs get from access to scale. How does that resonate with what we see in the World Bank Group, looking across our portfolio at the World Bank, IFC, and MIGA? What are maybe one or two lessons that we can take from our own projects about what helps with this next stage of scaling and creating jobs?

[Robin Mearns]
Great. Thank you, Ed.

Theresa has given some really excellent examples from Nigeria. Of course, Nigeria is one of the fast-track countries under our World Bank Group gender strategy. I am very proud to be able to associate with quite a few of the examples you gave.

Actually, the World Bank Group is in a position to support women entrepreneurs along this full financing spectrum. It is base-of-the-pyramid sorts of engagements with savings and loans groups at local level, women's affinity groups such as under the Nigeria for Women program, on the public sector side, through microfinance to growth equity. So there is a whole bunch of different types of financing instruments.

One example and opportunity where we see the ability to get to scale is with gender bonds, leveraging capital markets so that we can really significantly expand our reach.

A good example of this is in Türkiye, where IFC supported the first digitally issued gender bond with a bank, and it set a new benchmark for financial innovation and women's economic empowerment, mobilizing private capital so as to provide access to capital for women-led businesses.

A second great example is IFC's Banking on Women program. On the supply side, it helps financial institutions tailor their value proposition to women customers along the lines that we have heard from Katarina and Theresa in MSME finance, housing finance, and insurance. On the demand side, it helps address some of the non-financial barriers through services, again that we have heard about, like training, business coaching, mentorship, and so forth.

A really nice example in Egypt is IFC's partnership with Bank Misr, building on support through the Zat program. [possible hallucination: program name uncertain] This is really combining access to finance with advice and mentorship to help women entrepreneurs grow and scale.

A final example, there are many that we could give and I know we are short of time, is IFC's Sourcing2Equal program, which is going beyond access to capital. It is also about access to markets, enabling women-led businesses to take part in corporate value chains and supply chains.

We have rigorous impact evaluations through the regional gender innovation labs that really point to the effectiveness of these kinds of personal initiative training and other interventions.

I could give many more examples, but I will stop there in the interest of time.

[Ed Mountfield]
Thanks, Robin.

I am going to give the last word to Katarina.

You are being celebrated today for the ability that you and ProCredit Bank have shown both to support access and to help women scale their businesses and deliver impact. What is the thing that keeps you awake at night still? What is the problem maybe you have not been able to solve, or what is next on your agenda in terms of this journey? What is the next frontier?

[Katarina Zdraljevic]
Okay.

I think the first aspect to mention here is that there are many systemic barriers, as we can hear, and this is something that one institution cannot solve on its own. So I think this is one point that I must say, and the partnerships are the most relevant here, that we must work together between different financial institutions on local and on global level, in cooperation with IFIs, DFIs, but then also different local and global associations.

For example, we are members of 2X Global, Financial Alliance for Women, UN Women. This cooperation and joint action is something really important, and we still need to focus on that because systemic barriers are bigger than us as an institution.

The second one is the missing middle. We have on one side micro companies where an important aspect is access to finance and how to onboard them into financial inclusion. Then we have other companies that are already there, MSMEs, but we have this middle, which is lower small or very small, as we call it. There, I think they need a bit more than just financial services. They need more advisory. They need mentorship. This is where training and capacity building are really important for the financial industry, and I think we still need to work on this as a financial industry as a whole.

At ProCredit we constantly invest a lot in trainings, but this never stops and it has to be reinforced.

The third aspect is the data, which we have not mentioned, but is the big elephant in the room. There is not enough good-quality data, and this is not an isolated topic for us at ProCredit. I think it is something that affects all financial institutions. There are many different initiatives, such as We Finance Code in many of the countries of operation. Where We Finance Code has been started, we joined, we worked on improving the quality of the data.

This is one of the aspects that we really still need to work on continuously. Although we have made significant progress, we are not there yet.

[Ed Mountfield]
Thank you very much, Katina, and also Theresa and Robin. I think we have had a very rich discussion.

We have heard that getting access to finance is a very important first step, but it is vitally important that we go beyond that. We do not just tick the box of inclusion, but we help businesses to succeed and to thrive and to scale and to create jobs. To achieve that, we need to bundle support, and we need to think about financing that is packaged with other forms of support and advice and capacity building. We need to tackle unconscious biases, and we also need to work in partnership.

I think there are some very important takeaways and some very inspiring stories.

Thank you again to our panelists, and please give them a big round of applause.

[Shibani Pandey]
Thank you, Ed, Katarina, Robin, and Theresa, for the candid discussion.

On that note, we conclude the formal part of our program. But for those of you here at the Preston Auditorium, our conversations will continue just across the hall where a light reception awaits you. Please do stop by the photo booth and also try your luck at our gender data quiz.

Before we close, I would like to take a moment to recognize my fellow colleagues from this year's Gender Leadership Award planning committee. I'd like to ask my colleagues to join me on stage: Atsuhiro Oguri, Berta Blasco Lázaro, Mattia Coppo, Samia Abdelmoumene, Tomoe Nakano, and Rome Chavapricha.

A very special thank you to MIGA's gender team as well as communications colleagues who have been incredibly helpful and supportive throughout the planning of this event.

Wishing you all a great day ahead, and hope to see many of you across the hall for the reception. Thank you very much.