IIX Closes First 'Orange Bond' $50m To Invest In Women Organizations in Southeast Asia

A Singapore-based company has just raised $50 million for its fifth Women's Bond, which will make loans to women in Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, and the Philippines across agriculture, clean energy, sanitation, and affordable housing, the Guardian reports.

The company, Impact Investment Exchange, says the bonds, named after the color of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 5, will help close the gender gap in women's livelihoods in Asia and Africa.

"The Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis aggravated gender disparity, and women in the Global South are left to bear the brunt of it," IIX CEO Durreen Shahnaz says in a statement.

IIX is the first company to comply with the Orange Bonds Principles, developed by a coalition of impact investors.

Orange bonds, named after the color of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 5, must abide by a set of criteria and are intended to become an asset class of their own.

IIX estimates orange bonds could unlock $10 billion in genderlens investing by 2030, which would empower 100 million women and girls to develop solutions to achieve gender equality and build a more inclusive and resilient world.

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Ganesh Natarajan is the Founder and Chairman of 5FWorld, a new platform for funding and developing start-ups, social enterprises and the skills eco-system in India. In the past two decades, he has built two of India’s high-growth software services companies – Aptech and Zensar – almost from scratch to global success.