Honorable Secretary General of the United Nations, President of the General Assembly, Executive Secretary of UNCDF and your Excellencies -- Good Morning.

Thank you for giving the me the opportunity to speak to you all today about ‘Creating a New Asset Class for the Global South’. It is indeed a great honor.

Like many of you here, I grew up in a developing country scarred by war; where, despite best efforts from the global community, development initiatives had failed. I emerged determined to find a way to make development work for the Global South and harness the power of finance to make it work for the 99%.

As a Muslim woman of color working on Wall Street early in life, I came to believe that finance could be the answer – that it could be harnessed, redirected and rechannelled to address systemic inequalities.

I was fortunate to survive the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11, and later the collapse of the banking system in the 2008 financial crisis, but I remained a defiant optimist. I founded IIX and its sister organization, the IIX Foundation, two pioneers in the impact investing movement, a movement that harnesses the power of finance for social good.

Two decades on from 9/11, we’re again faced with a world in turmoil. The world is grappling with thousands of displaced people from Afghanistan. Thousands in Haiti are still seeking food and medicine in the aftermath of the recent natural disasters. In the south of the United States, women are facing an attack on their rights over their bodies. And all around us, countries are grappling with shattered economies, out of control climate disasters and income inequality gaps….and a looming deadline for the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals – whose progress has been all but reset in the wake of the pandemic.

So, we have come full circle.

Or have we?

What did we learn? What stayed the same? and what changed? And how will the response and recovery be different? This time, will the Global South and the 99% be a part of the equation?

A decade ago, I started on my journey to connect the Wall Streets of the world with the back streets of underserved communities.

Through innovative finance, we have built the infrastructure for a new financial system where all people belong. We started by creating the world’s first social stock exchange, followed by Asia’s largest and most successful debt and equity crowdfunding platform for impact investing, the world’s first impact measurement verification tool, and the world’s first gender lens Social Bond to be listed on a stock exchange: the Women’s Livelihood Bond^TM series that effectively connected women from the last mile to the Wall Streets of the world.

IIX’s work proved that it is possible to unlock capital for the 99% and especially for women through determination and innovative finance.

As we were building a new infrastructure for sustainable finance to ensure the world achieves the UN SDGs, we saw both change and reversion to old habits.

We saw governments and multilaterals embracing impact investing and sustainable finance to unlock more private sector capital. IIX’s own innovations were pioneered with support from forward looking organizations, including The Rockefeller Foundation, USAID, the US International Development Finance Corporation, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, UNESCAP and UNCDF, who all have played a catalytic role in this new space, as well as private sector partners such as ANZ, Standard Chartered Bank, Shearman & Sterling, and Latham & Watkins.

However, we also saw how old habits die hard, as traditional development tools were repackaged as innovative finance. We saw colonial power dynamics reproduced, with billion-dollar funds from the Global North flowing top down to the South, without a voice or representation from those impacted by the money. We saw the rise of impact washing, green washing, and pink washing. We saw continued race relation dynamics. We saw women still treated as an afterthought in the global climate finance movement.

So will we come full circle by repeating our mistakes or by learning from them?

If the human race and this planet are to survive, we have no choice but to embrace what we have learned from our mistakes and act on these learnings.

We have learned that women are the world’s largest emerging market, that investing in women is the smartest strategy to accelerate COVID recovery and climate action, and that addressing the gender gap could add $12 trillion to the global economy by 2025.

We have learned how giving a woman a loan can positively impact her family, community, and country. In Asia Pacific alone, 50 million women-led SMEs provide employment to over 100 million people.

We have learned how innovative finance can create livelihoods for women, mitigate risk for investors, and enable finance to reach the last mile and the 99%. Through our $150 million Women’s Livelihood Bond Series we will continue to support the livelihoods of over 3 million women across Asia Pacific and Africa over the next 4 years.

And most importantly, we learned how to do this by listening to these women to measure and verify the impact that has been created by the investment

In the next cycle, we’re going global with these innovations, by launching the world’s first asset class by and for the Global South and the 99%, with the Orange Bond Initiative.

The Orange Bond Initiative, with orange being the color for SDG5: Gender Equality, is a series of blended financial vehicles.

Similar to how ‘Green Bonds’ finance climate resilience, Orange Bonds will be a new asset class which aims to unlock US$ 10 billion to empower ~100 million women and girls around the world by the end of the decade. The Women’s Livelihood Bond Series are the first bonds under the Orange Bond Initiative.

Now is the time for a bold feminist capital market intervention to level the social and economic playing field.

Therefore, the Orange Bond Initiative will aim to achieve three key objectives:

1. Help build a gender empowered financing system by developing a set of global standards in gender equality.

2. Mobilize new sources of capital for women’s empowerment at scale by providing the tools and knowledge that enable gender lens investment product development.

3. Fast track gender equality and women’s empowerment by using capital to ensure the SMEs in the Global South grow in ways that are valued by women.

This is an initiative that IIX and its partner UNCDF have already begun exploring. I invite you all to join us in this movement, support it, finance it, and bring it to the Global South, to the 99%.

We just passed a quarter of a century since women’s rights were recognized internationally as human rights, rights that we need to preserve and nurture.

It is up to us to keep building the infrastructure for a world where our voices are heard, where we as women are valued in the financial system, and where we are empowered as partners for systemic change. Let us complete the circle of development and make finance work for all. Let us make finance work for women. Let us make it work for the 99%.