Today, 50% of Tala’s small business customers globally are women. We’re proud to support these women and their businesses with credit and other financial services. But, we still have a long way to go.
Despite representing half of the world’s population and potential, women and girls are often still marginalized. Men earn on around 23% more than women globally and a recent World Bank study on the potential of female entrepreneurship in Africa showed that female entrepreneurs’ incomes are only two-thirds of that of male entrepreneurs on average. Adding to that, COVID-19 is expected to push an estimated 47 million additional women and girls into extreme poverty and further widen the gender poverty gap.
It’s therefore more important than ever to bridge the gender gap and support women. Following International Women’s Month, we want to make sure our efforts don’t stop there. Here are some ongoing efforts to help women break barriers at Tala and beyond.
Supporting for micro-entrepreneurs in Mexico with skills training
Tala has been supporting first-time women micro-entrepreneurs, known as “Nenis” in Mexico, through a program called Talaneando (Tala Cares). The Talaneando program has already impacted over 65,000 women across the country and gained the support of allies like Estafeta, GoDaddy and Samsung. On International Women’s Day, we hosted a workshop to help women who do business online overcome challenges.
Promoting financial literacy in Kenya
As one of the founding members of the Digital Lenders Association of Kenya (DLAK), Tala launched the third annual Money March campaign in 2022 to improve financial literacy. The theme this year was #BetterMoneyHabits that featured a special Podcast series for women listeners to help them understand how to build better money habits around spending, saving, borrowing and investing.
Celebrating Women at Tala
Starting with International Women’s Month, we’ve held multiple events to celebrate the women of Tala and their impact on their colleagues and communities. In one of our celebratory happy hours, Maggy Nyamumbo, CEO & Founder, Kahawa 1893, joined us to share her story of building a major coffee brand in Kenya.
Achieving 50% female-representation on our leadership team
Tala has made a conscious effort to achieve better gender diversity on our team. We’re proud that 50% of our leadership team are now women.
Promoting benefits that matter
We have also put in place employment benefits that can help women maintain their work-life balance. Employees have the flexibility to manage their own schedules, whether hybrid or fully-remote, and have unlimited PTO, generous maternity leave and days off for unexpected life events. Our people team have regular check-ins with mothers to understand their unique challenges and benefits they want and need.
In Tala’s experience, having a balanced representation of men and women at the leadership level has made us more willing to embrace vulnerability, deal with difficult decision-making with compassion and have a human-first approach.
We believe achieving gender diversity, at all levels, is a commitment that all corporations need to make to be able to bridge this gap. But the good news is that this is not some kind of tradeoff. When employees prosper, companies prosper.
