Institutional gender mainstreaming and strengthening of gender-lens investing activities in Botswana

Context

The National Development Bank (NDB) of Botswana has a mandate to finance individuals and businesses, including start-ups and well-established companies. The focus is agricultural lending for food security and feeding the nation. The World bank report on Botswana states “Botswana has come a long way in awarding women’s equal rights.” Despite all these reforms, the Women, Business and the Law score for Botswana is still low at 63.8% which is below the global regional score at 77.1% and the Southern Region average score at 74.1%. Most organizations like NDB are still behind in being able to offer tailor-made products for women to improve access to finance to encourage them to take on more businesses initiatives or to support their businesses. This creates a situation where NDB still has less women applying for funding: Currently the percentage of women-let businesses financed by NDB stands at 8.5% for all the sectors and within the agricultural sector even only at 4.1% of the total loan portfolio. This shows the need to make sure women access to finance is improved.

Objective

The ICR Facility is providing tailor-made technical assistance to NDB Botswana to strengthen its internal gender operations and client-facing gender-lens investing activities, ultimately to better serve women-led MSMEs with improved access to finance.

This intervention comprises the following areas of support:

Institutional gender mainstreaming. NDB Botswana will capture its current institutional progress with regards to gender, including both internal aspects, for example HR, and client-facing measures, for example the design of products and services. NDB Botswana will establish a plan to tackle the existing gaps.

Design a gender-responsive M&E framework. Capturing, reporting and evaluating impactful data is a vital step in being able to better tailor services to reach more women as clients. NDB Botswana will design a gender-responsive M&E framework to incorporate crucial data and set key performance indicators.

Refinement of financial services to suit the needs of women. NDB Botswana will conduct market research on the needs of (prospective) female clients and determine a strategy to make the products better accessible for female clients

Results

Upon completion of this intervention, NDB Botswana will have:

Conducted an institutional gender assessment
Developed a gender policy, gender strategy, and action plan 
Developed a gender-responsive M&E framework
Equipped staff members with capacity building on the new M&E framework
Conducted a landscape study on the agri financing landscape in Botswana, especially for women
Refined the financial service offer to suit the needs of women and have included non-financial services