Tuesday
December 13
2022

Press Release: Impact Investment Exchange (IIX) Closes the Women’s Livelihood Bond™ 5 – the Fifth Issuance in the Women’s Livelihood Bond™ Series and the World’s First Orange Bond

Impact Investment Exchange (IIX) has successfully closed the Women’s Livelihood Bond™ 5 (WLB5), the fifth issuance in the award-winning Women’s Livelihood Bond™ Series (WLB™ Series), raising US$50 million. The WLB5 will create livelihood and empower ~300,000 women and girls in emerging markets across Asia and Africa, making it the first multi-continent bond in the Series.

IIX’s WLB™ Series are listed innovative financial instruments that use a blended capital structure to pool together a multi-country, multi-sector portfolio of high-impact enterprises focused on advancing gender equality. To date, the Series has mobilized US$128 million, empowering over 1 million women across Asia and Africa to transition to more sustainable, climate-resilient livelihoods, advancing 12 of the 17 United Nation’s (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and accelerating socio-economic recovery post the COVID-19 pandemic. Continuing on the success of previous issuances, the WLB5 makes history as the first sustainable debt issuance to align with the Orange Bond Principles™Orange Bonds – drawing their name from the orange hue of SDG5: Gender Equality – is the world’s first asset class built by both the Global South and Global North with a mission to build a gender-empowered financial system, particularly for the 99%.

The WLB5 brings in both “orange” and “green” with a portion of the proceeds allocated to empower women to advance climate action. IIX recognizes that the transition to a net-zero future and improved adaptive capacity of emerging markets cannot be achieved with half of humanity – women and girls – left out of the solution. IIX is one of the only women-led Sustainability Bond issuers based in the Global South, with women and people of color comprising the majority of the staff working on the WLB5 issuance to ensure high gender-lens capacity and commitment to inclusion and diversity.

Photo courtesy of UN Women/Second Chance Education and Vocational Learning Programme.

Source: Impact Investment Exchange (link opens in a new window)

Categories
Investing
Tags
gender equality, impact bonds, impact investing, SDGs, sustainable finance, women entrepreneurs, youth