The European Investment Bank (EIB), the money-lending arm of the EU, is to launch a new gender strategy to increase women’s participation in global economies.

From 1 January the bank will implement new rules designed to ensure its lending will help women and men equally, following growing evidence of the economic advantages of female equality.

According to the bank, up to $12tn could be added to global GDP by 2025 by advancing women’s equality. It says the public, private, and social sectors need to act to close gender gaps in work and society, and acknowledges that it, along with other multilateral development bank, has a seminal role to play in making this happen.

Eleni Kyrou, senior social development specialist at the EIB, said the bank wanted to be “gender aware and gender sensitive”, so that its investments benefit women and men equally. “We are saying let’s have the gender lens, be aware of gender structural dynamics on the ground and really try to invest cognisant of this,” she said.

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For example, she added, in societies where the landowner is the male head of the household but those working on the land are mainly women, and there is damage to that land, without a gender lens, compensation is likely to go to the male title owner, but the actual income loss would probably be felt by women. “We wanted to flesh out the gender dimension in our sustainability framework and make that more robust and responsive to gender inequality,” she said.

The EIB has already loaned money to organisations such as Jordan’s Microfund for Women, which helps women start their own businesses. Seventy per cent of those who live in poverty in the country are women, and they are often refused bank loans, according to the EIB, which lent €2m to the Jordan Microfund in 2014.

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EIB president Werner Hoyer said involving women in business leads to faster economic growth. “There is abundant evidence to show that gender equality and the economic empowerment of women leads to faster economic development, increased competitiveness and more prosperous communities,” he said. “That in turn helps to create more efficient and effective businesses, better management of our natural resources and overall more socially cohesive and stable societies.”

The strategy will run until 2021 and the EIB plans to set targets as part of a gender action plan towards the end of summer 2017.

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