By Paul-Harry Aithnard, Roseline Abé and Aniéla Koffi
Managing Director of Ecobank Côte d’Ivoire & Executive Regional Director UEMOA · Managing Director of EDC Investment Corporation · Head of the Ellever Program
One year after the first Gender Bond in the UEMOA, it is time for African finance to fully grasp this tool.
In finance, there is a category of anomaly that economists struggle to explain without discomfort: that of high-performing assets that the market systematically underfunds. In West Africa, women-led companies belong to this category.
Resilient, job creators, anchored in the real economy, they nevertheless remain on the fringes of credit circuits. Less than 20% of them have access to adequate financing. This is not a failure of entrepreneurship. It is a structural gap in current financial systems.
The most recent data is unambiguous. According to the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 — the largest global survey on financial inclusion, published in July 2025 — women in sub-Saharan Africa remain 12 percentage points below men in terms of access to financial accounts. Nearly half of the women in the region remain unbanked. In Côte d’Ivoire, despite the progress made in recent years, the overall banking rate has increased, the gap between men and women persists structurally and has not yet been bridged.
The African Development Bank estimates the financing deficit facing women entrepreneurs on the continent at $42 billion. This figure should be seen not as a fate, but as a colossal opportunity for African capital markets.
The question is not whether financing for women is useful. It is why capital markets have taken so long to embrace it. Gender Bonds provide a possible and concrete answer to this inertia. These debt instruments channel funds specifically towards initiatives aimed at reducing gender inequalities and strengthening women’s economic empowerment. They are not about philanthropy or regulatory constraint. They are about impact investment logic, traceable and measurable, reconciling profitability and responsibility.
Yet the global market has reserved them a meager place: $14.5 billion in 2023, barely 1.5% of the sustainable bonds market. In Africa, their adoption remains almost nonexistent. It is in this context that Ecobank Côte d’Ivoire decided to change the paradigm.
On March 3, 2025, a few days before International Women’s Rights Day, we launched the first Gender Bond in the UEMOA region, named “Ellever Gender Bond 6.50% 2024-2029”, with a value of 10 billion CFA francs. Structured and arranged by EDC Investment Corporation, a specialized subsidiary of the group, and backed by investments from the International Finance Corporation and the Africa Local Currency Bond Fund, the operation exceeded all our expectations: closed in 48 hours, it recorded an oversubscription approaching 11 billion CFA francs. The subscription period was scheduled for two weeks. Institutional investors, mostly European, represented 95% of the subscriptions. The market spoke clearly, leaving no room for doubt: when instruments are well constructed, capital follows.
The funds raised exclusively support the Ellever program, launched in 2021 to provide Ivorian women entrepreneurs with access to credit, financial education, and strategic support. In 2024, more than 3,465 companies had joined, benefiting from 13.25 billion CFA francs in disbursed financing. The Gender Bond allows for at least 3,000 additional loans to female SMEs. This is not just a number. Behind each funded project, there is a woman paying salaries, educating her children, and structuring a sector.
This success compels us to further our reasoning. The success of an operation is not just political. It is a signal. It demonstrates that African capital markets are capable of producing instruments aligned with development goals without sacrificing their attractiveness. The BRVM, which hosted the first listing of this Gender Bond in June 2025, provided unprecedented regional visibility to this bond. What Ivory Coast initiated, other financial centers in the UEMOA and beyond can amplify.
But for this to happen, certain conditions must be met. Regulators must create clear and incentivizing issuance frameworks. African institutional investors — pension funds, insurers, retirement funds — must engage more with these instruments. Banks must accept that financing women is not just a side program of social responsibility, but a full-fledged business line with its own resources, granular data, and quantifiable objectives.
Financing a female entrepreneur is financing a multiplier. Economic literature has documented this for decades; field experiences confirm it every day. What Gender Bonds add to this evidence is the ability of markets to transform a conviction into capital allocation. Africa cannot afford to wait another ten years for this evidence to become the norm.
