Linked Foundation, based in the United States, focuses its impact on addressing women’s health often overlooked in Latin America. Together with its partner, New Ventures, Linked Foundation developed Empodera 360º to provide technical assistance and finance for women’s health ventures (WHVs). Linked Foundation’s and New Venture’s relationship based on trust and collaboration has allowed to consolidate a comprehensive program that seeks to support WHVs financially and non-financially in order to strengthen the health sector with a gender lens.

Overview

Social, economic, and gender inequalities result in health inequality. They are systematic and prevent people and communities from reaching their full potential in health.1 One of the barriers leading to health inequality is gender inequality, not only owing to the gaps that women face in accessing health services, but also due to their participation as workers in this sector, considering that 70% of the socio-health personnel globally is comprised of women.2

The barriers faced by women become evident specifically in reproductive, maternal, neonatal, children’s, adolescents’, and violence-related health.3 This situation is even more concerning in the case of vulnerable women (living in poverty, indigenous communities, rural areas, among others), who face more systematic barriers to access reproductive health, which results in an unmet need for contraception, unwanted pregnancies, and undiagnosed cancers and STIs [sexually transmitted infections].4

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In Latin America, a region marked by social and economic inequalities, there is a relationship between the lack of opportunities in the formal labor market and gender inequality in health. This is because women’s participation in the labor market is 53% in urban areas compared to 77% for men. Additionally, 79% of employed women work in low productivity sectors, where rates of access to social protection are also low.5 The impact of this situation is strongly evident in that it restricts access to social protection and therefore to health care and services.

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Despite these challenges, impact investment with a gender-lens in the healthcare sector is very low. Between 2018 and 2019, impact investors deployed more than $600m USD in 619 deals in Latin America. $291m USD focused on the agriculture and microfinance sectors, while only 20 deals–equivalent to $8m USD–were invested in the healthcare sector.6 This is because investors presume that, in the case of healthcare, clients look for low costs or free public services instead of higher-quality private options; hence the assumption that the public sector should be in charge of these investments. Additionally, many healthcare companies are too large to receive microfinance or informal local investment, yet too small or risky for banks, private equity firms, development financial institutions, and other investors focusing on financing larger, more mature organizations.7 This way, not only did an unexplored healthcare issue arise, but also the opportunity to address the finance gap for this sector.

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Linked Foundation, an organization created in the United States in 2006 that works on ensuring that financial resources are deployed for social impact creation, look into the finance gap in women’s healthcare as an opportunity to achieve a more structured and systemic impact. Linked realized there was a demand from low-income populations in Latin America for client-centered, high-quality healthcare solutions and that initiatives that address that need are profitable, and make returns on investment.

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Linked Foundation’s mission includes a gender-lens based approach on the premise that women are essential agents of change as health and economic decision-makers for families and society. This assumption backed its engagement in investing in an underfunded sector with a focus on women, who receive less financing as entrepreneurs, and are particularly a vulnerable group in terms of health. To achieve its goal, the foundation invests technical and financial resources to develop and scale social enterprises that improve the health of communities throughout Latin America and the U.S.