Giving Compass' Take:

• Willy Foote, CEO of Root Capital, explains how his equity grants from the IKEA Foundation and Wagner Foundation will pilot programs which focus on gender-inclusiveness in their business. 

• Foote talks about how female workers 'continue to face barriers despite the work he does for gender-inclusivity. What are some of these barriers that women face?

• Read about the explosion of gender lens investing in 2017 and learn about how important this practice is for women and girls. 

Willy Foote, the CEO of Root Capital, said that even with an investment strategy that explicitly focuses on women workers, the Root team found that female workers continued to face barriers to access.

Foote’s firm targets “highly gender-inclusive” agricultural businesses, which “enable women farmers, who have very unequal access to productive resources and assets, deliberately creating jobs and opportunities for women within the business and local communities,” he said.

But despite these investments, some disadvantages persisted, surveys revealed.

Speaking at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford on Thursday, Foote said “With funding from the IKEA Foundation and the [Wagner Foundation] we have piloted gender equity grants up to $20,000 to particularly high-performing gender-inclusive businesses where they can take the grant funding as opposed to debt financing or training.

The grants act as both an award and an incentive to boost gender-inclusiveness in businesses already thriving on Root capital.

“You need to create a lot of partnerships to drive into the different flavors of capital, from grant funding to impact investing dollars, to meet the whole need, especially as you get into these issues around childcare, and the daycare facilities around processing plants, for example,” he said.

Foote added that Root Capital managed to assemble its donors based on the firm’s inclination to seek out “unusual partners,” but said the model — using small grants to boost impact in a certain sector or area — could be facilitated by a number of players.

Read the full article about equity grants by Molly Anders at Devex International Development