Women don’t use their growing economic power to invest in socially responsible companies and causes to effect change.

As 50 percent of the workforce and decisionmakers for more than 85 percent of household spending, women are wielding more and more economic power every day. A 2009 survey indicated that women were the driving force behind most household charitable donations. However, Jackie Zehner, former Goldman Sachs partner, says that women don’t always put their economic power to drive social change by investing their money where it will make a difference.

According to Zehner, we target organizations that we feel will make a difference and we donate money or volunteer, but we don’t put the power of our money to work for others and ourselves.

As I considered my own staid investments and personally-motivated giving patterns, I realized that she was right. While I gave money to organizations that impacted my life or those of my loved ones, or causes I feel strongly about, my investments remained relatively anonymous and impersonal.

Now, you can make many more personal choices when investing. You can not only make a solid return, but invest in a cause or movement you feel passionate about. Recently there has been a rise in targeted investments for people who want to invest in green or socially beneficial companies or organizations.

I decided to try it out on a small scale. Kiva, an organization well-known for making microloans to small business owners in developing countries, many of them women, is now offering a category of green loans. In fact, after the recent media attention, Kiva’s green loans are so popular that they are funded extremely quickly.

I went to Kiva.org and reviewed the selection of green loans. Each requestor has a photo and a summary about them, their family, and their business. Humanizing my investment helped me be excited about the outcome of my gamble. Rather than having my 401k account purchase a small number of shares in Dell and several other companies along with thousands of other people, I can see real change with a small amount of money. Seeing individual stories reminded me that women business owners, no matter where they are located or what their product or service is, face similar challenges.

I liked Sergia’s profile. She owns her own home and lives with her partner, Daniel, and their two small children. She has worked diligently on her land for more than eight years to grow healthy crops to support her family and pay for her children’s education. Sergia walks an hour each way to sell her crops in a nearby city and makes a good profit. She is always looking for ways to improve her harvest and wants to buy more land and increase her output in the future. She has taken out eight previous loans and repaid each one on time. She is requesting this loan to buy animal manure to fertilize her crops and generate healthier produce.

Once I chose Sergia, I decided to invest twenty-five dollars. I reviewed Kiva’s field partner information and the transparent loan repayment information. Sergia has eight months to repay the loan. Once I am reimbursed, I can reloan the money to someone else, donate it to Kiva, or withdraw it via PayPal.

Along with my loan amount, Kiva adds an optional donation for operating costs to my cart (clever), which I decided to give. I checked out with just my loan to Sergia this time, but you could make several loans to different individuals if you choose.

Kiva notified me just hours after I made my loan that Sergia received all of the funding she requested. For the price of a hardcover book, I helped Sergia move that much closer to her goal of growing healthier and more abundant crops that will fetch her a better price at market. With her additional earnings, her family will be more secure and she can look toward purchasing more land and expanding in the future.

Each year, my donations also go toward helping people, but they only go as far as my checkbook or the amount of time I have to volunteer. At Kiva, once my initial loan is repaid, I could re-loan it to another small business owner, and another one after that in a cycle that could benefit many. Now, in my donations and investments, I can direct my funds where I want to make an impact. I can invest in other women-owned businesses, agricultural loans, housing, clean water, or other green initiatives.

Sometimes change comes about one small, helping hand at a time.

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Help women and you help the world. It’s a philosophy gaining traction among international development gurus who say women in the global south are the best providers for their families and communities. According to a New York Times Magazine article by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn published last August, women in the developing world are often more responsible than men when it comes to managing money in the home, making them prime beneficiaries for microfinance loans.

“In general, aid appears to work best when it is focused on health, education and microfinance (although microfinance has been somewhat less successful in Africa than in Asia),” write Kristof and WuDunn. “And in each case, crucially, aid has often been most effective when aimed at women and girls; when policy wonks do the math, they often find that these investments have a net economic return. Only a small proportion of aid specifically targets women or girls, but increasingly donors are recognizing that that is where they often get the most bang for the buck.”

In their book Half the Sky, named for a Chinese saying that “Women hold up half the sky,” Kristof and WuDunn argue for an increased focus on women and girls when it comes to international aid, maintaining that countries with pitiful track records on women’s rights are also the countries most mired in poverty and extremism. Fix the former and you fix the latter, they say.

Kristof and WuDunn provide a compelling argument. But their philosophy should go one further: in addition to reducing poverty, helping women also helps the environment. According to a recent article in The Jakarta Post, the Indonesian Environmental Ministry has begun offering classes to women in Yogyakarta and Central Java about water conservation. Since women provide food for their families, they’re also the ones who acquire water each day. “In almost every village, it is a woman’s responsibility to provide water, whether as a mother or daughter,” says Linda Amalia Sari Gumelar, the Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Minister. Public works agencies that build water projects ignore the needs of women at their own peril. “Planners should be aware of the different conditions: women on foot and men on motorcycles. In housework, water is closely-related to domestic work. Distances between water sources and settlements should be calculated carefully.”

Since women transport water, and then use it to cook and clean for their families, they make natural gatekeepers for water sources, the first-line-of-defense conservationists who can teach their peers how to make their daily water portion go further. Though the true impact of the Environmental Ministry water protection classes in Indonesia has yet to be realized, focusing on the environment by focusing on women is smart policy. Women hold up half the sky – it’s true. And if we let them, it’ll be a cleaner sky at that.

Image: ESP Indonesia

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