Women Entrepreneurs Financing Initiative

This project supports the Women Entrepreneurs Financing Initiative (We-Fi). We-Fi’s mandate is to unlock the potential of women-owned and women-led small and medium sized enterprises (WSMEs) in developing countries. It mainly emphasizes WSMEs in low-income countries and countries dealing with fragility conflict and violence. It aims to do this by sustainably addressing constraints these women face and by reducing the WSME financing gap. We-Fi enables WSMEs to grow create jobs and improve productivity. Project activities include: (1) increasing access to finance; (2) strengthening access to markets; (3) ensuring access to training mentoring and networks; and (4) improving the enabling environments for women in business. With funding of US$353 million from 14 governments We-Fi’s collaborative partnership among multilateral development banks governments and other stakeholders provides a unique ecosystem to unlock financing for women-owned and women-led businesses in developing countries. We-Fi works with six multilateral development banks as implementing partners: the African Development Bank Asian Development Bank Inter-American Development Bank European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Islamic Development Bank and World Bank Group (including the International Finance Corporation). We-Fi has issued four calls for proposals to deliver on its mandate. The most recent round focused on addressing the needs of women entrepreneurs exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis through the use of digital technologies and leveraging finance and data.

The expected outcomes for this project include: (1) supported over 200 000 WSMEs; (2) mobilized US$3.5 billion from the public and private sectors to amplify We-Fi’s capacity to respond to the negative impacts resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic such as job losses greater burdens of domestic care work and declining markets; and (3) implemented projects in over 66 countries with 65% of the funds going to low-income countries including many facing fragility conflict and violence.