Kylah is a nurse at BFLA’s clinic in Belize City, where people can access comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services, COVID-19 testing and treatment, and general medical check-ups. Thanks to seed funding from Fòs Feminista’s Feminist Impact Fund, BFLA purchased laboratory equipment last year to better meet SRH needs, including by providing low-cost screenings and services, while at the same time creating a sustainable source of income for BFLA.
Thanks to the Feminist Impact Fund, developed in collaboration with Kaya Impacto, our partners have been able to parchase equipment to better meet SRH needs.
With the shared purpose of catalyzing the impact generated by organizations pursuing social enterprise ventures, Fòs Feminista and Kaya Impacto began working together in 2021 to co-create a tailored investment process for the Feminist Impact Fund—a $2.5M (USD) six-year initiative created by Fòs Feminista that mobilizes and invests debt-based capital into locally led organizations that seek to create, incubate, and scale revenue-generating social enterprise solutions that expand and improve SRH access for women, girls, and gender-diverse people.
As a reflection of Fòs Feminista’s commitment to reducing inequities in access to financing, the Feminist Impact Fund seeks to use catalytic capital to help close funding gaps currently faced by intersectional feminist organizations advancing access to care in the Global South. As a Gender-Lens Fund, the Fund exclusively invests in and tracks measurable improvements for:
- Intersectional feminist nonprofit organizations that are either led by or have at least 50% women and gender-diverse people on their Boards of Directors and are often not eligible to receive traditional investments due to their growth stage or their inability to offer equity to investors.
- Solutions (products, services, and initiatives) that expand, increase, and improve access to SRH for women, girls, and gender-diverse populations in the Global South.
- Partners of the Fòs Feminista international feminist alliance.
Fòs Feminista and Kaya Impacto designed a tailored investment process seeking to embody the values of horizontality, equity, and collaboration. Tailored investing is a highly promising approach that is grounded in the idea that a social business model and its needs should come first, and the terms of financing should be developed in response. Both organizations are convinced that a tailored approach to investing can contribute to dismantling the unequal, unilateral, and often patriarchal power dynamics of traditional grant and repayable funding.
Together, Fòs Feminista and Kaya Impacto built a thorough robust, transparent, and horizontal investment and due diligence processes driven by two-way collaborative dialogues wherein nonprofit organizations seeking financing. Fòs Feminista, investors, and an Investment Committee (made up of 75% women) collaborate with the common purpose of developing, refining, and investing in financially sustainable and impactful social business models. This investment structure aims to blend instruments from the full investment spectrum that has been developed over the last 15 years by mission investors, including recoverable grants, concessional debt, and quasi-equity to create the necessary conditions for specific social enterprise models to thrive.
The process is rooted in providing partner organizations with comprehensive and clear information about investors’ expectations, funding criteria, and conditions, so they have the agency to decide and apply to the type of financing that best fits their models’ needs. This is coupled with personalized technical accompaniment, collaboration, and knowledge sharing from Fòs Feminista’s Innovation and Social Enterprise Lab that bolsters and uplifts the strengths and expertise of nonprofit organizations to locally effect change, contributing towards breaking cycles of inequality in their countries and contexts in a financially sustainable manner.
In June of 2022, the Feminist Impact Fund made an investment into the Belize Family Life Association (BFLA), a longstanding Fòs Feminista Partner Organization and the leading provider of SRH care and services in Belize, by applying the investment and due diligence process created in partnership with Kaya Impacto.
BFLA secured a $175,000 USD three-year loan to co-finance an integrated SRH clinic in its headquarters. With this financing, BFLA was able to complete the funding needed to renovate their current two-story headquarters (expanding the ground floor to include a respiratory unit, where staff can care for patients with COVID-19 symptoms and patients with respiratory illness or asthma prior to referring them to secondary and tertiary care; and adding a third floor to expand their laboratory capabilities and create a new space for their sex for pleasure social enterprise model called “BFLA After Dark”).
This funding will also allow BFLA to purchase equipment and supplies required to begin offering an expanded package of 36 integrated SRH and preventative health services and contraceptives to an estimated 13,000 unique clients annually, projecting a total annual service volume of 190,000 in a base scenario. BFLA projects that it will generate approximately $800,000 in revenue annually.
“Traditionally, the primary process and concern in accessing a loan from any lending institution are built on the foundation of ability to pay back in the specified period, risks are hardly ever considered. The tailored approach to due diligence employed in qualifying for and accessing the FIF, afforded BFLA the opportunity to conduct an in-depth analysis of its financial health, factoring potential risks and opportunities, allowing for forecasting in a manner never been done before as well as exploring avenues for which the investments could make the greatest financial impact and performance. This experience has equipped us with the competence to conduct deeper analysis of the association’s finances as well as with a greater appreciation for due diligence and its value even in the hiring of staff”. Joan Burke, Executive Director of BFLA
User-centricity sits at the core of intersectional feminist led innovation and social impact. Maintaining a permanent and acute understanding of these stakeholders is vital to promptly adapt and constantly refine this investment process. Fòs Feminista and Kaya believe that the success of this approach will hinge on adequately responding to the changing and emerging needs of nonprofit organizations advancing social enterprise initiatives, while aligning to the goals of investors through ongoing open dialogue, candid feedback loops, and knowledge exchanges. We are convinced that this innovative investment process can be successfully replicated across sectors and geographies and add value to the gender-lens and impact investing ecosystems.
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About Fòs Feminista | Fòs Feminista was launched as an intersectional feminist alliance in 2021 to address emerging challenges in the field of Sexual and Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice (SRHRJ) and accelerate progress toward a feminist future working in partnership with nonprofit organizations across the Global South who are committed to improving the health and lives of women, girls, and gender diverse people.
With the support of the Innovation and Social Enterprise Lab, nonprofit Partner Organizations provide Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) services to marginalized populations through social enterprise models co-created with the women and girls they serve1. The Lab created and runs a yearly Social Enterprise Incubator Program wherein Fòs Feminista Partner Organizations ideate, test, refine, and prototype revenue generating impact driven initiatives. The Lab manages a $2.5M gender lens impact debt fund and invests on average $500,000 USD per year in grant funding for social enterprise innovations.
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About Kaya Impacto | Fòs Feminista has partnered with Kaya Impacto SAPI de CV (“Kaya”), a financial advisory firm with offices in Mexico, Colombia, and Spain. They specialized in providing financial and strategic expertise to socio-environmental entrepreneurs, impact investors and foundations so that they are able to structure and maximize their business and impact. Kaya is a certified B Corp organization, which supports the best companies for the world in their work and performance on social and environmental matters. Kaya has helped to raise $35 million USD for social enterprises across 13 countries and worked with more than 10 impact funds and foundations including IDB Lab, Heifer, SDC, Alterna and Co_Capital among others.
