Meet Marilou van Golstein Brouwers, a former Girls’s World Banking Board Member and an undoubtedly instrumental determine in founding Girls’s World Banking Asset Administration (WAM) and managing its first fund.
Investing and earning profits doesn’t have to return on the expense of the better good, and when performed correctly, these alternatives can—and will—contribute to a greater world for everybody. However when Marilou van Golstein Brouwers started her profession in personal banking, she discovered that the 2 paths usually diverged and alternatives to mix these objectives have been exhausting to search out. “It shocked 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 certainly one of her shoppers impressed her to maintain searching for investments that might 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 a terrific alternative to assist construct a values-based financial institution,” Marilou says. There, she helped develop their preliminary impression investing actions, which led to the launch of a subsidiary, Triodos Funding Administration, the place she’d function Managing Director for almost 20 years—though it might nonetheless be greater than 20 years earlier than the time period “impression investing” was formally coined. Again then, she remembers, microfinance simply referred to loans for small entrepreneurs; it wasn’t thought-about one thing to put money into. Nevertheless, Marilou knew that there was not solely market worth within the potential to speculate, however that it is also a catalyst for growing ladies’s financial empowerment.
Following the launch of Triodos Funding Administration, she took a board place with Girls’s World Banking to assist drive our mission of accelerating ladies’s monetary inclusion world wide. Marilou’s experience in impression investing helped Girls’s World Banking impact coverage modifications in capital markets and industrial banks that have been coming into into microfinance alternatives, whereas additionally working to assist our World Community Members as they expanded outreach and merchandise geared towards low-income ladies.
Throughout her almost 10 years on the Girls’s World Banking board, Marilou proved instrumental within the improvement and founding of Girls’s World Banking Asset Administration (WAM)our gender lens funding subsidiary that makes fairness investments in inclusive monetary establishments in world rising markets. “Moreover all of the work Girls’s World Banking was doing in recommendation, advocacy and group constructing, I knew that with the ability to make investments can be useful available in the market and make a distinction for ladies’s financial empowerment.” As soon as she stepped down from the board, she was requested if Triodos Funding Administration can be keen 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-knownproving social returns needn’t come on the expense of monetary returns. In 2022, WAM closed its second impression 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 companies. Whether or not it’s a chance to open a checking account—which in some nations, remains to be not attainable for ladies—or having access to capital as a girl founding father of an enterprise. She highlights monetary literacy as one other main impediment for all ladies throughout the socio-economic spectrum, declaring that far too many ladies are nonetheless handled by bankers as incapable of constructing their very own monetary selections. “It’s undoubtedly not sensible on the a part of the banks as a result of plenty 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 supplied monetary companies in a sustainable method.” And it’s these companies that allow individuals, and girls particularly, to raised handle their day by day lives, to deal with sudden difficulties, and to meet aspirations and plan for the long run. She reiterates {that a} holistic lens is important as a result of “all of it begins with inclusion typically, and monetary inclusion for ladies particularly.”
Girls’s World Banking is grateful to have labored with Marilou all through the years and for her inclusive, ahead pondering that has each launched and formed packages which have positively impacted ladies world wide. As Marilou displays on her time with us as a “nice pleasure,” she notes that the ladies she labored with offered belief, assist and empowerment for each other, too. “(The expertise) has actually enriched my life.” She shares that it’s a terrific level of happiness and delight that achievements in advocating for ladies’s financial empowerment have been the results of collaboration, of girls—and males—placing their egos apart to work collectively for a better goal. “When ladies thrive, communities thrive. It is so simple as that.”
Girls’s World Banking has modified the lives of hundreds of thousands of girls, remodeling their households, companies and communities, and driving inclusive progress globally by way of monetary inclusion.
Immediately, utilizing our refined market and client analysis, we flip insights into actual motion to design and advocate for coverage engagementdigital monetary options (see Blanca’s story right here), office management packagesand gender lens investing.
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