Tag: unwomen40womenleaders

Founder of EverHaus and Secondate Beauty

When she was only 22 year old, Gitta shattered stereotypes by founding her own venture capitalist firm. She is committed to empowering the millennial generation of Indonesian entrepreneurs. 

“I owe my business acumen to my two parents”, Gitta recalls. The daughter of two entrepreneurs, she had acquired her business sense almost as soon as she learnt how to speak. Whenever they went out together, restaurants, theme parks or cinemas, she had to guess how much money the institution made in one day and what it could do to improve the business. 

Gitta’s love of finance started when she realized how much capital flows affected the growth of different industries and steered innovation. It was for her, the catalyst for change. From that moment, she made it her mission to help her country’s development by attracting as much capital as possible into the Indonesian economy, leveraging a growing young generation of entrepreneurs. While in the US to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in finance, she launched a publication called Think Nusantara, directed at Indonesian students abroad to encourage them returning back home to drive Indonesia’s growth. It didn’t take her long to take the lead in doing that.  

In the early days of her senior year, she went to her counselor’s office and announced that she wanted to graduate early. She bought a one way ticket to Singapore – the VC hub at the time – and for several weeks, networked her way around the region, visiting all possible Investment conferences and startup meetups. Gitta was determined to pursue her goal and worked on a first pipeline of curated tech businesses, pitching the idea of building a new fund. “Most people thought I was crazy, but some believed in me. They became my first sponsors and in many ways, my first mentors”. And  they did well to do so. One year later, her VC firm EverHaus was ranked as the most active seed stage firm by deal count in Indonesia. 

“As a woman trying to raise capital, you are often faced with the question of how our family-life will impact our work down the line. Whenever I receive that question, I answer that I will have children one day and devote my heart to them as a proud mother. But so will my husband” Gitta firmly declares, convinced that the first barrier to women is “the one in their head”. To debunk this self-imposed wall and support businesses that truly caters to women’s needs, she made a shift in her investment strategy to focus on impact-driven consumer brands. It is an investment that also makes financial sense. Women make up 50% of the population and dictate more consumer and household purchasing decisions than men. Instead of investing directly into women entrepreneurs, she built a thesis around industries that women are more naturally drawn to. As a result, she works with more female entrepreneurs. Her latest achievement was the release of her own beauty brand – Secondate Beauty, that evangelizes the idea that beauty comes from self-confidence. “It’s a message that struck a chord in many girls in Indonesia. The girls who were told they couldn’t, the girls who were told they shouldn’t and the girls who don’t believe in themselves”. 

Gitta is not the kind of person to wait for things to start materializing. She believes that a fast,  global shift has to come from the top down. She already has a blueprint in mind to bring more capital towards women’s needs: a multi-generational women-led fund, geographically constrained but not limited to enterprises of a specific size, to maximise the local network effect and support mentor-mentee relationships.

CEO of GCM Group and Angel Investor

“A catalyst” is the word to portray the serial marathon-runner and mother-of-twins, Svida. Having been the impetus behind the digital transformation of the 40-year-old family publishing house, she is now fostering platforms to give the podium to all Indonesian women. Not just those on glossy magazine covers. 

When she is not busy scouting young creative talents for the next Jakarta Fashion Week (which she founded), Svida bubbles with ideas of programs to empower fellow women entrepreneurs, like the national Wanita Wirausaha Femina program (Femina’s Entrepreneurial Women) which she also initiated. 

Svida grew up surrounded by progressive intellectuals and mission-driven entrepreneurs. When she was eight years old, her parents and aunt co-founded the country’s first modern women’s magazine, Femina, to fill a vacuum in an Indonesian publishing industry that was essentially envisioned by men. Under the authoritarian regime of Suharto where only 100 self-restrained titles were authorized, the open tone of the avant-garde magazine offered a unique window on women’s roles in modern society and for years it enjoyed an uncontested monopoly on the women media landscape. But in the early 2000s, the end of Suharto’s rule opened the publishing market to international competitors. Meanwhile, digital disruption had led to many foretelling the death of traditional printed media.  

But not Svida. When she took the reign of the publishing dynasty in 2007, after a few years working in financial services, she saw the opportunity to put the enterprise on a few footing, shifting from a pure content provider to becoming a community builder. She renamed her newly-appointed young chief editors “chief community officers”, to make them personally responsible for a given audience of women with shared interests. This departed from a one-size-fit-all editorial that could no longer use a single voice, to cater the various needs and aspirations of an increasingly diverse public of women readers. Svida understood that in this new era, women expected more than remote role models and not-so-conventional discourses: they needed to feel involved in communities closer to their own realities and more tailored to their own dreams.

Creating a space to catalyse women’s self-advancement has always been Svida’s inner mission. But Svida wants to make this space accessible to every single Indonesian woman, not just the well-heeled audience of Femina. Last year, she spun off some of her flagship platforms and events and created her own vehicle with GCM Group, to focus on community building and incubation platforms. 

Svida is a strong believer that power and creativity comes from diversity, a principle that applies within women’s communities too. The Wanita.network (Women.network) she initiated, has already gathered more than 1,000 well-connected peers across different groups of age, regions and social classes: from the urbanist Millennial in Jakarta to housewives in Sumatra and women smallholders in Papua. Through the platform and regular webinars, they can discuss and exchange topics ranging from vaccination and child education to cooking and fashion. 

For Svida, women don’t need to be high-figures or successful entrepreneurs to positively influence the space. A woman alone has power, but a collective of diverse women has impact. 

As a media platform, Svida feels that GCM has the responsibility to bring more diverse views to promote equality in places where roles are still very much gendered, like parenting. For Svida, the GLI space needs to be conceived in a more holistic manner, to tackle resistant cultural and gender norms, that often occurs within the household. Education and sensitisation are important to both men and women, to show that a housewife can also be the breadwinner and plays a complementary, not a conflicting role to a husband. Svida warns against the risk of tokenising women: “To ‘give room’ for women participation is not [the same as] to give them an equal place” she says. 

GLI newcomers risk falling into the binary or cookie cutter approach. But Svida knows all too well that empowering women requires first to understand their different needs and aspirations. The genderization of the investing space should not lead to oversimplification of women. Svida has spent her last ten year to make sure that every woman can have the space to  express herself and a community she can relate to. A 60 year old widow in rural Java faces different challenges than the 25-year-old house cleaner in Jakarta, or the daughter of a scavenger in suburban Jakarta. Svida is the one who could bring a good dose of complexity and ensure investments bring about well-targeted impact.

CEO and Co-founder of KUMPUL.ID

Faye Alund is all about impact. An active ecosystem builder who believes in the power of networking, Faye creates spaces that invite women and minorities to come in and participate.

“I thought about what kind of work I wanted to do – is it helping the rich getting richer, or do I want to do something with my life?” Faye contemplated.

Born and raised in Jakarta as a middle-class Chinese-Indonesian, Faye always knew it was going to be tricky for her to achieve her dreams. Working in the government would be difficult for reasons that were mostly related to her ethnicity.

Eventually, after completing studies in psychology, she joined a nonprofit organization supporting conflict-affected populations, working as trauma counsellor in Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Yemen and many other areas went on for 12 satisfying years. But driven by her thirst for impact, Faye started to seek more.

“I started to wonder how we can push economic development,” Faye said. She quickly realized that entrepreneurship could be the key to Indonesia’s future she envisioned. “Not only do businesses generate income and provide employment but they also solve problems. A lot more businesses will solve more problems,” Faye said.

She concluded that the coworking business model would have the highest social impact for economic development. In 2014, together with her husband, Faye launched KUMPUL – a co-learning platform empowering coworking spaces to build ecosystems that focus on entrepreneur growth. KUMPUL curates programs and runs it through coworking spaces as the main catalyst for entrepreneurship ecosystem growth.


In early 2016, the couple began to gather other players and build awareness of the importance of coworking. What started with about 20-30 players grew to over 230 spaces spanning in 45 cities across Indonesia. The association – called Coworking Indonesia – now includes coworking spaces, makerspaces, creative hubs and creative communities.

As she started working with more women entrepreneurs at the grassroot level, Faye discovered certain constraints that limit their growth. Most were rooted in social responsibilities, such as taking care of children and parents, or being in charge of community’s traditional events. Faye saw that a lot of women fail because the dominating narrative in business and finance – as it has always been for centuries – is very masculine. Only women with so-called “masculine traits” usually thrive in the space.

“If you want to look at the population of women at large, not everyone [has those traits]. Now everyone must realize this first,” Faye said.

Faye never thinks of herself as a woman. In her mind, she is just someone who has something she wants to do, and she’s doing it all. But she recognizes the privilege she enjoys may not ring true for a lot others.

“After that realization [of privilege], I started to intentionally inject gender equality concepts in everything we do,” she affirmed. 


At KUMPUL, up to 80% of the team are women. She also tries to make sure that 50% of their speakers are women. And the same for participants. She also tries to push inclusivity to go beyond women, including persons with disabilities.

The majority of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Indonesia are owned by women (51%). But the bigger the enterprises, the fewer women one finds. In total, women’s SMEs account for just 9.1% of Indonesia’s GDP, Faye said. “Now imagine if we can bring that up,” she added.

As an ecosystem builder, Faye believes that programs catering to the pre-business stage must be improved. Nurturing women-led entrepreneurs or women-impact businesses must focus at the very start of business growth, to ensure quality businesses survive at the end of it.

Faye is interested in increasing engagement and collaboration with women entrepreneurs and hopes to see more innovation from regulators. Beyond that, Faye encourages everyone to also think about how businesses can have a real impact on women.

Faye is an important figure in connecting startups across the country. She is a stellar example of how networking is vital for the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Board of Indonesia untuk Kemanusiaan (Indonesia for Humanity) 

Anik is an experienced fundraiser for women’s rights activism works in Indonesia. She has spent nearly two decades supporting community organizations working with marginalized people to fast-track social transformation, specifically in gender equality.

Anik grew up in Jakarta. Her father was in the military, and her mother was a graduate from a teacher school. Young Anik saw how her mother busied herself working as a teacher – how she seemed to do multiple things, but in the end, would only be handed a supporting role.

After completing her Business Administration bachelor degree at University of Indonesia, Anik joined Multilateral Development Bank Watch at the International NGO Forum on Indonesian Development (INFID) as a campaigner, while lecturing at Atmajaya University.

In 2001, she flew to the Philippines to pursue masters in Development Management at the country’s Asian Institute of Management. The following year, Anik went to Remdec (resource management development and consultant) and was assigned to lead Indonesian Social Foundation for Humanity (YSIK). Later, she also joined the Asia Foundation and the World Population Foundation focusing on gender-based violence and sexual reproductive health and rights.

Looking back, Anik’s awareness of gender came gradually, years after she started her career. She realized that even within NGOs working in human rights, a gender perspective was still something uncommon.

“I came to know gender very slowly,” Anik says. “The inequality between men and women makes me wonder about my own values, and it was inevitable that it affected my spiritual life,” she ponders.

As Anik met with more figures who frequently talked about feminism, her understanding grew. The issues affected her even more greatly after National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan) approached YSIK for help. The commission wanted YSIK – which later became known as Indonesia for Humanity (IKa) – to collect public funding and manage a women’s fund. The fund was later called Pundi Perempuan.

Through IKa and Pundi Perempuan, Anik and her team mobilize public contributions in all areas – funding, volunteers, network and knowledge – to help activists do their work. What the fund does is essentially filling the gap between large international NGO networks and grassroots, community-based initiatives who often do not need a big amount of cash to create real impact.

Pundi Perempuan provides a trust fund for women crisis centers in Indonesia assisting women victims of violence. Currently, Pundi Perempuan can only serve six organizations in a year. Ticket size for each organization is around IDR 20 million (USD 1,400), which means, every year Pundi Perempuan needs to collect at least IDR 120 million (USD 8,400). 

“For knowledge gaps, for example, Pundi Perempuan teaches basic things such as how to make a good report, who to contact, and other practical tips. IKa also sources networking,” Anik explains further. 


For now, IKa has four funds – Pundi Insani (Human Rights Fund), Pundi Perempuan (Women’s Fund), Pundi Hijau (Green Fund) and Pundi Budaya (Cultural Fund). Even though only one fund (Pundi Perempuan) explicitly focuses on gender issues, IKA remembers to ask their partners in other funds to also be gender conscious. This way, IKa’s also serves as a link to build intersectionality between issues. 

For GLI to contribute to Indonesia’s philanthropy space’s growth, the Government must provide clear regulation and goodwill to improve quality, Anik says. Strengthening professionalism and keeping hold of the organization’s values cannot be separated. Moreover, there needs to be continuous efforts to develop knowledge and understanding from donors about fundraising. “Treat this as an investment to build a more just society,” Anik always tells her donors.

Moving forward, Anik wants to expand the Pundi Perempuan model to other regions in Indonesia. She envisions Pundi Perempuan to be more than just a philanthropic project. It could be a movement. A drive to build solidarity across different communities and raise awareness about women issues and burdens. 

Fundraisers like Anik show that GLI could and should be more than just focusing on women-led businesses.

CEO/Founder of Bubu.com and Angel Investor

A tireless creative mind and visionary entrepreneur, Shinta entered the tech industry 24 years ago when the word “internet” was almost unknown in Indonesia. Since her first breakthrough with Bubu.com, Indonesia’s leading digital agency, she has sowed the seeds of dozens of pioneering tech enterprises, and is an angel investor and a mentor for high-potential startups. 

When Shinta founded Bubu.com in 1996, it never crossed her mind that she would be one of the only women in this nascent tech industry. “I did not know anything about gender gaps when I started: I just fell in love with the Internet”. Her encounter with the World Wide Web happened just two years earlier in a computer lab at Portland University, where she worked as a graduate assistant while pursuing a MBA in business management. After studying architecture, she found that designing websites was much more disruptive/appealing to her than drawing building plans. At the time she set up the web design enterprise, Internet Service Providers and Internet Cafes were just emerging in Indonesia, and she knocked on every door as she built her own network. 20 years later, Bubu.com is a leading force in the digital marketing industry and Shinta now liaises with other world-renowned tech icons, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Wozniak and Sheryl Sandberg. 

Driven by her eagerness to disrupt the industry, Shinta always ignored gender stereotypes or segmentations and embraced her passion for both tech and fashion. Today, her first venture Bubu.com designs bespoke mobile applications for Indonesia Fashion Week and has handled Manchester United’s Social Media planning and strategy in Indonesia and Malaysia for the past 8 years. When she is not busy with new business ideas, Shinta enjoys scouting around for new batik textiles and shopping online – she actually envisioned and made one of the first e-commerce platforms, Telkom’s Plasa.com (now it is known as Blanja.com), before it attracted eBay’s joint venture and investment. Survival video games startups and techwear labels are among the Indonesian enterprises she propelled on the international scene. 

With a mission to “put Indonesia on the world technology map”, Shinta kicked off various initiatives to nurture the next Indonesian digital trailblazers, including a pioneering venture capital firm, Nusantara Ventures. When it comes to investing, Shinta looks at the capacity of a enterprise to create sustainable value and monetize good ideas that prevail. “I look at the entrepreneur as an individual, not as a man or a woman” she says. Shinta also launched a new venture called Startupindonesia.co – an online platform to connect all the startup ecosystems in Indonesia, with the aim to democratize networks and knowledge for the national tech startups, especially those with a strong socio-economic impact.

Yet, Shinta also sees the need to deconstruct the image of the tech industry as a “boys’ club”. This year, Indonesia’s biggest technology conference that was founded by Shinta, IDByte, will focus on women in digital, and introduce a new incubation program for senior female University Students called Supergirls in Tech. It will also be the launchpad of a women-focused Tech Conference. “More female role models in the sector will help to unlock talents and reveal passions that women did think possible before”, she believes.

Impact Investment Lead at ANGIN

Atika is passionate about bridging people and building capacity for both investors and entrepreneurs. Always striving for impact, Atika has learned how to educate the market on defining and incorporating a gender lens.

Being the only female among three siblings, the family always turned to Atika whenever they needed to make a decision. It created the perfect soil for Atika’s confidence and character to grow.

Upon graduation from Prasetiya Mulya University, Atika started working at a financial services enterprise in Indonesia. She used to work with large corporations and the public equity market as part of her role as an equity analyst. It wasn’t until 2015 that the 28-year-old was made aware of conversations around social impact. The media was buzzing with a clash between online motorcycle taxi provider app Go-Jek and conventional taxi enterprise Blue Bird, spotlighting the role of startups and impact creation to improve communities’ livelihoods. 

Her closest circles, who are mostly women entrepreneurs, also increased her awareness about the issue and motivated her to learn more about small-medium enterprises development.  With this objective, she pursued a Master’s degree in Australia under sponsorship from the Australian government, where Atika learned more about business strategy, impact investment and social enterprises. The experience during her study also gave her a better understanding about equality.

Upon returning to Indonesia, Atika joined ANGIN to get first-hand experience in driving impact. Since she started, she has been in charge of any social impact-related projects and investment opportunities. She meets entrepreneurs and connects them to investors within the ANGIN network.

Atika is heavily involved in workshops and training, including sessions with women-owned social enterprises and social impact-driven businesses. She also mentors and supports them to fundraise. 


Although there is a growing trend of investors pledging capital to women entrepreneurs, Atika finds that the unconscious biases towards women entrepreneurs persist. Many say women entrepreneurs have “different traits”. For example, if they are being assertive, they will be called “aggressive”. If they are being realistic, they will be perceived as giving too low of a valuation or projection. This kind of perception heavily impacts fundraising activities, making it difficult for women entrepreneurs to access capital with fair terms. 

Currently, Atika is working on the development of ANGIN’s online investment platform targeting small and medium enterprises that are mostly in consumer goods in the women’s market. 
 Atika also works to encourage more women investors to join ANGIN network. 


“ANGIN is a big player in contributing to raise the awareness of GLI. Our unique position in both investment and advisory services, research, and, in part, advocacy can help educate the market about how to define and look at the gender lens,” she says. 

For Atika, GLI is best described when one incorporates gender empowerment in the whole investment process, before and post investment: either by looking at the investees or how the potential investments could leverage value to women either from the product or leadership. It should also consider governance policies to support entrepreneurs to accommodate gender empowerment, such as equal paternity and maternity leave to balance out the gender roles.

While Atika sees high potential from women investors, GLI can also be about bringing men investors to the same conversation. “I always say that the gender lens is not always about women (exclusively),” Atika says. 

Same goes for the demand side. When GLI ceases to be exclusively about women entrepreneurs, there are actually quite a lot of investable opportunities in Indonesia, especially if you consider the smaller ticket sizes. They could be solutions benefiting both women and men to support gender balance. 

In her position at ANGIN, Atika is one of the key figures defining what GLI should and could be. She is highly influential thanks to her unique position in between supply and demand sides and will use that as an advantage to further educate and shape the market.

CEO of Sintesa Group and Founder of Angel Investment Network Indonesia (ANGIN)

CEO of one of the renowned strategic investment enterprises, Shinta Kamdani is the brain behind numerous pioneering programs and institutions in Indonesia supporting women entrepreneurship and gender equality in the workplace, including the country’s first Women Fund and the Indonesian Business Coalition for Women Empowerment (IBCWE). 

Shinta’s entrepreneurial mindset was cultivated from the youngest age – selling educational books door-to-door at only 13 years old. Eldest of a family with two daughters, she was early prepared to inherit the enterprise built by her father, spending weekends and summer holidays at her father’s office to drill her business skills. 

But Shinta climbed the corporate ladder by herself, determined to be more than the “daughter of the boss”. From her first position in the family business as an employee in the marketing division, she gradually rose through the ranks to eventually become Managing Director in 1998. 

As one of the few women CEOs in Indonesia in the late 1990s, Shinta had to carve out her place in a male-dominated business environment, developing a management style of her own. While leadership often implies individual ambition, she built a corporate culture that emphasizes collective participation and inclusion, binding together the values of excellence and empowerment. Ignoring comments when breastfeeding her child in between meetings, she proved that being a mother and a successful business leader were not incompatible roles. Today, Sintesa Group provides lactation rooms to its women employees, and is the first business group in Indonesia to receive the Economic Dividend for Gender Equality (EDGE) certification. 

Being an ethnic-Chinese non-Muslim, and a woman leader in Indonesia, Shinta had an acute sense of her “triple minority”. In May 1998, an economic crisis hit and violent riots targeting Indonesian Chinese entrepreneurs took place. As many lost out, she stepped in. What started as a philanthropic action, eventually became a full microfinance and mentoring program supporting early-stage enterprises. Along the journey, she became aware of persisting gender inequalities in access to finance, especially in rural areas, where various collateral and social constraints deprive women of personal financing and credit facilities. Realizing that she could use purposefully her high-level position and influential connection, she gathered 15 female HNWIs to pioneer the first Women Fund in Indonesia, with backing of the Angel Investment Network Indonesia (ANGIN). Until now, the fund has successfully empowered five enterprises led/owned by women, including the first plant-based restaurant chain and the first bean-to-bar enterprise in Indonesia, 

Year after year, Shinta relentlessly mobilized her personal network to bring more men and women into the discussion, creating various institutions to spark effective collaboration between ecosystem stakeholders. Building stronger synergies between all the stakeholders is essential to bring significant gender-transformative change. “Until now, most of my job has consisted of creating linkages between the right people,” she recalls. She leverages her international network to scale the “gender lens space” and is engaged with government-level bodies as a member of the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). 

Today, the Indonesia Business Coalition for Women Empowerment (IBCWE) that Shinta currently presides over supports more than 30 member enterprises to design women-friendly workplace policies, providing them with advisory services, mentoring and an inter-corporate network for good-practice sharing.

Shinta insists on the importance of considering gender equality across the business spectrum. “There is a large misconception among investors, that gender lens investing will limit them to niche market segments or microfinance activities. On the contrary, it is a grid to unlock the full potential of women, at all levels of the economy”.

Holistic Beautifier,

Director of Martha Tilaar Spa and Puspita Martha International Beauty School

“A holistic beautifier” is how Wulan introduces herself on her social media. To beautify Indonesia and Indonesian women inside and out, is also the motto of the 100% home-grown beauty empire that she co-leads with her mother, instilling women empowerment into every single aspect of the enterprise. 

“I was ‘brainwashed’ since my childhood to work for a woman-sensitive business!”, Wulan cheerily jokes. Seven years before Wulan came into this world, her mother, Martha Tilaar, established her first beauty salon in the family’s garage of a residential district in Jakarta. Wulan was born the same year her mother created her first makeup brand, and grew up along with the enterprise’s impressive expansion to become one of the country’s largest purveyors of natural beauty products and services. 

Her parents were both progressive teachers, practicing equal parenting and both convinced of the role of education as the key to improve the people’s livelihood, whether male and female. Before she herself got married, Wulan advised her husband that she would never choose between being a mother, a wife and a working woman. But walking in the shadow of “The Mother of Indonesian Natural Cosmetics”, was a challenge she was not ready to take on. She went to study in the United States, where she gave birth to her first child and started to build a life of her own. After nine years away, her mother invited her to come back to Indonesia to handle the enterprise’s new spa franchise, affiliated to a therapist program for underprivileged girls. “To create jobs and new life paths for other people is priceless,” said her mother. That sentence struck a chord with Wulan, who realized the true purpose of her mother’s business and decided to champion this mission too. 

Women empowerment is one of the four “core pillars” of the enterprise. It goes beyond the traditional donor-recipient approach of corporate philanthropy and ensures that women can work to build a path to their own development, rather than making development work for them. Through the spa therapist scholarship program, Wulan has successfully implemented a shared value strategy, providing the girls with therapist skills that will give them alternative routes to escape unsafe and precarious career paths, while nurturing a well-trained and loyal workforce for the enterprise. After the training, they are given the choice to work three years for the Group, or to build their own business, supported by a network of 5000 alumni who provide support as peers and role models. 

The holistic approach means that Martha Tilaar goes beyond women economic empowerment, touching upon the underlying social and cultural barriers women and girls face in isolated communities. The local anchoring of the brand and its penetration within the communities, allows Martha Tilaar to be both the corporate that supplies the funding or the mentoring program, and the grassroot organization that listens to the needs of the communities and builds trust with them. Beyond the vocational training program, Wulan established the Roemah Martha Tilaar (“Martha Tilaar’s House”) in 2015 – a cultural and community center designed to provide a “safe house” to vulnerable young girls in Gombong. The  regency has one of the highest rates of early teen marriage in Indonesia, correlated with higher rates of early pregnancy, divorce and domestic violence. The House organizes various activities to cultivate the girl’s creativity, self-confidence and entrepreneurial spirit, whilst promoting local craftsmanship to tourists and generating new sources of income for the surrounding villages. 

For Wulan, building more success stories for women and girls in remote areas is the key to scaling impact up and outwards. The low self-esteem and the lack of parental support and peer models has prevented women from even considering having an independent life journey, for instance in deciding their own career or life path based on their own will. Martha Tilaar has been working for decades to gain that trust, and now she sees that more parents are encouraging their daughters to follow their training program.  

A more holistic model requires more cross-sector and cross-stakeholder cooperation on the supply side, from investors, SAOs, to other capital providers. Through the UN Global Compact Network Indonesia, which Martha Tilaar helped establish in 2006, Wulan has connected with other like-minded enterprises to share their respective training programs and offer more options to women. 

Martha Tilaar Group is without doubt the prototype of the “all women powered” enterprise. It is women-founded and women-led. Women are its end-consumers and can be found at every single stage of the enterprise’s value chain. The enterprise approach is a case study for promoting a multi-faceted approach to women empowerment. For those who wondered how a business could better take women and girls into consideration, or what kind of issues women and girls at the grassroot levels could possibly face in Indonesia, Wulan is without doubt, the most valuable source of information.

Founder of Yayasan Cinta Anak Bangsa Foundation (YCAB)

For Veronica, gender and impact are not a lens, it is a second nature. As one of the most influential voices in the impact investing sector, her “journey to impact” led her to grow her foundation into an innovative structure that transcends the gaps between the financial and the social worlds, nonprofits and for-profit corporations. She is integrating women’s economic empowerment into a holistic approach to break the generational cycle of poverty.

Dropping out at 18 was a painful decision for top student Veronica. She did not know it yet, but just seven years later, this experience would prompt her to build Indonesia’s largest nonprofit turned social enterprise YCAB (Yayasan Cinta Anak Bangsa), which manages dozens of Learning Centers (Rumah Belajar) for school dropouts and marginalized kids. 

When her father died, Veronica had to give up her studies to support her widowed mother, who suddenly faced the responsibility of managing her own finances. Veronica eventually graduated a few years later from Imperial College London – after giving birth to two children. Yet, this period of her life determined the two intertwined causes to which Veronica would eventually dedicate her entire life: improving access to education and women’s financial independence. 

Veronica founded YCAB in 1999 with her mother, initially as a non-profit organisation to offer affordable (U$ 70 cents/month) education and vocational training to marginalized kids. As the foundation struggled to reduce a dropout rate that remained stubbornly high, it soon appeared that the kid’s education attainment could not be disconnected from the whole household’s economic empowerment, especially the mothers. “I am a strong believer that when you empower the mothers, the entire family will get better”, Veronica comments. 

So in 2010, Veronica created a mission-driven microfinance program targeted to low-income housewife-entrepreneurs, through a unique conditional ultra-micro finance system that made the education of their child a prerequisite to loan. In just a few years, the program managed to significantly improve the children’s school attendance, but also helped women micro capital recipients (more than 184,000 so far) to triple their income after two years in the program and many managed to build savings too. Veronica developed this model into YCAB’s holistic mission to “break the generational cycle of poverty”, binding together education and financial inclusion. 

This virtuous circle theory also shapes the self-sustaining structure into which YCAB has developed. YCAB Foundation is now backed by their own impact venture firm, YCAB Venture which own the 25% of YCAB Foundation, with the remaining majority by herself and some minority holding by the management. All the dividends of the portfolio enterprises invested by the firm will naturally be booked as income by the Foundation. At the same time, there are a few “affiliated enterprises” whose dividends also directly contribute to the Foundation through Veronica’s personal shareholding. 

Although most of the invested enterprises are women-led and impact-driven, it has  never been part of a conscious women empowerment strategy for Veronica. For her, prioritising women is mostly out of a personal natural instinct: “I am just a woman helping other women. I also have a lot of girls and women of all ages working with me. But this is not discriminatory [acts to men]”, Veronica states. 

In the same vein, gender is not the first lens in YCAB Ventures’s investment decisions. “We consider first the business model with the obvious business potential to profit and then we consider the sector – primarily targeting viable and impact-driven enterprises. But if I am confronted with two business models with similar returns, I will probably naturally go for women-led or business that empowers women ”, Veronica says. 

For the naturally gender-minded Veronica, expanding the GLI space requires refraining from a “girls only” approach. “We do not want boys to be left behind”, warns Veronica. To move the gender lens space beyond a mere “natural women inclination”, strong policy guidelines by the government are needed to support financial literacy and access to finance. But for Veronica, these policies have to be contextualized and formulated hand-in-hand with local “champions”, so that good practices can be effectively replicated and adapted in more underserved areas. Social organisations or enterprises, like YCAB, could play the role of “brokers” to translate government policies into well-targeted actions and also to explain what’s statistics cannot show.