The Project
Agora Partnerships, a nonprofit that catalyzes equitable and inclusive businesses across Latin America, will build the productivity and social and environmental sustainability of women-led small and medium enterprises (WSMEs) in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico. Agora will develop a transparent and data-driven Information Exchange Platform (IEP) that will facilitate relationships and transactions between WSMEs and capacity building, market linkage, and finance actors. The platform will collect, verify, and share data across the network of partners to decrease financing and market risks associated with information asymmetry and “opaque” WSME data.
Values and Outcomes
Agora Partnership’s project is confronting an entrenched issue in Latin America – a lack of support for women-led enterprises – in a moment when this type of support is particularly critical to an equitable recovery from COVID-19. The goal is to onboard 1,000+ women-led businesses to its platform over the next few years. Agora plans to incorporate input from WSMEs during design and development, which is an important step in making the project representative and useful for women-led enterprises. Overall, market and financing actors will be able to use WSME’s transactional data housed in the IEP to make better informed gender-equitable decisions.
For more information on Agora Partnerships, visit their website.