81303887-Institutional gender strengthening and gender-lens investing in four development finance institutions

The Investment Climate Reform (ICR) Facility through one of its implementing agencies - the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ) - seeks to support national and sub-regional development finance institutions (DFIs) in African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to become stronger institutions and to identify, prepare and implement projects and investments with high development impacts, especially related to women"s economic empowerment (WEE) and gender-lens investing (GLI). This assignment intends to provide tailor-made capacity building for four DFIs to enhance the gender approach on a strategic and operational level within these institutions to ultimately improve the investment climate and access to finance for women. To this end, each DFI, jointly with the ICR Facility, developed a workplan for their tailor-made support demands. The four main areas of support that the banks will undergo are the following: 1. Institutional gender strengthening. This includes conducting institutional gender assessments, looking at both the internal and client-oriented activities, revising existing or developing new gender policies, strategies, and action plans, and capacity building on how to implement a gender policy, strategy, and action plan. 2. Improving the Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) frameworks to become gender-responsive. This includes reviewing existing M&E frameworks and systems, incorporating new or improved indicators that capture relevant gender and sex-disaggregated data, developing new standard operating procedures (SOPs) and M&E manuals, and capacity building measures on gender-responsive M&E implementation. 3. Refining of financial and non-financial services. This includes reviewing existing financial and non-financial services for women, identifying areas of improvement (e.g., alternative collateral requirements), developing new or improving existing gender-sensitive financial products, and align these services with the DFI"s gender policy, strategy, and action plan. 4. Accessing international funding. This includes mapping of international funding sources for which DFIs would be eligible and designing an action plan to access such a source.