How It All Started
Our story started thanks to a shared passion and conviction that there is a different way to Build Forward Better. Together.
In early March 2020, just before Covid-19 lockdown, Anne Ravanona, Founder & CEO of Global Invest Her, had the honour of being invited to a private lunch with President Macron and several other Gender Equality dignitaries, where she presented her plans for #1MillionInvestHers as well as her suggestions on how to improve access to capital for women entrepreneurs. We commit to these actions as part of our commitments to the Generation Equality Forum 2021, in support of SDGs 5 and 8.
Anne Ravanona, founded her social enterprise Global Invest Her in 2013 after a 20 year career in global business and management consulting to Fortune 500 companies. End of 2012, she went to an event on women's entrepreneurship where she had asked what was the speaker's greatest challenge as an entrepreneur? "Access to funding" was the woman entrepreneur's answer. Anne got curious, and read the research on women entrepreneurs and access to capital, when she came upon an IFC report that estimated the funding credit gap between male and female entrepreneurs to be $300B at that time. The mother to a daughter and son, she learned agasp, that research* showed, even when the content of a pitch deck from a male and female entrepreneur was exactly the same (only a male or female voiceover differentiated the delivery), investors were consistently 70% more likely to invest in the male entrepreneur. Anne's greatest personal values are gender equality and respect and from the moment she discovered that women entrepreneurs only got around 2% of venture funding, she decided to dedicate the rest of her life to helping changing access to capital for women entrepreneurs.
She couldn't stand the thought that her son would have more opportunity to access capital than her daughter (if both decided to create their own businesses), just because of his gender. So Anne began interviewing hundreds of global women entrepreneurs about their funding journey. They confirmed the bias and barriers the research had highlighted. She founded Global Invest Her to create funding content for women entrepreneurs and help them build a global community to learn about funding and grow their businesses.
Parallel to being a woman founder herself, Anne also began her advocacy journey, speaking at TEDx, Tech and Funding Conferences around the world, to help others understand the problem, bias areas and share practical tips on how they could make a difference to change the funding game. In 2020, she was asked to present her suggestions on women's economic empowerment to President Macron of France, to help prepare the Generation Equality Forum. This is where she first presented her '1M InvestHers' concept, funding 1M women entrepreneurs by 2030, to help effect true global change.
After Covid-19 disruption, in 2021 she became an EU Delegate to the W20, where her policy suggestions on women's entrepreneurship and access to finance made the final W20 Communiqué shared with the G20 leaders. 18 months later she shared her key idea of allocating 1% point of the new 15% Corporate Tax to fund women entrepreneurs and help close the funding gap, at the first ever G20 Women's Empowerment Conference in Italy. Since then, she's building on her passion for building and executing on big ideas that make a difference to gender equality and sustainability to help change the funding game for women entrepreneurs and create a practical path to the G20 equality and sustainability goals.
She couldn't stand the thought that her son would have more opportunity to access capital than her daughter (if both decided to create their own businesses), just because of his gender. So Anne began interviewing hundreds of global women entrepreneurs about their funding journey. They confirmed the bias and barriers the research had highlighted. She founded Global Invest Her to create funding content for women entrepreneurs and help them build a global community to learn about funding and grow their businesses.
Parallel to being a woman founder herself, Anne also began her advocacy journey, speaking at TEDx, Tech and Funding Conferences around the world, to help others understand the problem, bias areas and share practical tips on how they could make a difference to change the funding game. In 2020, she was asked to present her suggestions on women's economic empowerment to President Macron of France, to help prepare the Generation Equality Forum. This is where she first presented her '1M InvestHers' concept, funding 1M women entrepreneurs by 2030, to help effect true global change.
After Covid-19 disruption, in 2021 she became an EU Delegate to the W20, where her policy suggestions on women's entrepreneurship and access to finance made the final W20 Communiqué shared with the G20 leaders. 18 months later she shared her key idea of allocating 1% point of the new 15% Corporate Tax to fund women entrepreneurs and help close the funding gap, at the first ever G20 Women's Empowerment Conference in Italy. Since then, she's building on her passion for building and executing on big ideas that make a difference to gender equality and sustainability to help change the funding game for women entrepreneurs and create a practical path to the G20 equality and sustainability goals.
Anne created the 1M InvestHers programme with great partners to fund 1M diverse and underrepresented women entrepreneurs by 2030.
