Giving Compass' Take:

• Patamar Capital, a venture capital firm in Asia that serves low and middle-income populations, discusses its gender lens investing strategy. 

• How can gender lens investing become a normalized practice in the philanthropic sector? 

• Read more about building a gender-lens investing. 

What motivated you to become a gender lens investor?

We have been thinking about the overall impact of our portfolio on women and girls for some time, even before we started formally engaging with GLI. Many of our team have had a long history of investing and supporting businesses in the microfinance sector, where women play such a crucial role. We had also noticed that the customer bases of many of our portfolio companies were predominantly female.

We began engaging more deeply with gender lens investing in 2017, when we were selected as an impact investing partner by Investing in Women (IW), an initiative of the Australian Government. Joining the IW initiative allowed us to learn from experts such as the Criterion Institute and  gave us access to a strong peer group of other like-minded investors. It was great to learn and share best practices, discuss new ideas and perspectives, and delve deeper into the practicalities of applying a gender lens to our respective portfolios.

What guides your investment decisions? Have you seen any returns?

The guiding force is different for each of our funds. For the IW Fund and the Beacon Fund (a new fund that we plan to launch soon), gender is the key guiding force. For others, gender is definitely an important factor but not the only one. We strive to apply a gender lens in all our operations and investment decisions and classify all our funds as gender lens funds.

Our approach to gender lens investing is captured in two areas:

  • Our due diligence process
  • Our internal investment and business practices.

Read the full article about gender lens investing by Shuyin Tang at avpn.