Equality between women and men is one of the European Union’s founding values and a key objective of the Sustainable Development Goals. As the EU's bank, we are committed to delivering projects that benefit all communities equally. Our duty is to ensure that women and men have equal access to our projects.
Gender norms have hindered women from realising their full potential. We aim to empower women by recognising their leadership capabilities and providing them with financial tools.
We are committed to support projects and investments that empower women worldwide, in line with our Gender Action Plan. The EIB's Climate Bank Roadmap 2021-25 commits us to invest strategically in projects that promote environmental sustainability, the green transition, and gender equality simultaneously.
The EIB was the first multilateral development bank to adopt the 2X Challenge criteria, which promotes gender lens investment in low and middle-income countries. We also helped establish 2X Global, an organisation that brings together investors and intermediaries to promote gender lens investing across developed and emerging economies.
Surveys such as the EIB Investment Survey and the EBRD-EIB-World Bank Group Enterprise Survey show that supporting female-led businesses can have positive economic, social, and environmental impacts. By supporting these businesses, we can increase female labour force participation and reduce poverty risks.
The EIB Group Climate Bank Roadmap defines the provision of gender-responsive climate finance as a thematic priority area for the EIB. It commits to invest more strategically in projects that simultaneously support the green transition, environmental sustainability and gender equality.
We invest in projects that enable women to actively tackle the effects of climate change, such as backing female-led climate funds and women entrepreneurs. We ensure that women have access to low-carbon infrastructure and services while tackling deep-rooted gender inequalities. Additionally, the EIB supports its clients to set targets for women’s employment and leadership opportunities in their climate projects through advisory and technical assistance.
We have also adopted a set of Environmental and Social standards to notably address inequalities and other factors contributing to vulnerability, marginalisation and/or discrimination in an EIB project. Standard 7 promotes gender equality as a basic human right crucial for sustainable development by outlining the promoter’s responsibilities for assessing, managing and monitoring project impacts, risks and opportunities related to vulnerable persons/groups.
We partnered with the UK's development finance institution (BII) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to lead an initiative called the 2X Climate Finance Taskforce within 2X Global. The goal was to use gender-smart investments to support climate action. In 2021, we launched a toolkit called The 2x Gender-Smart Climate Finance Guide at COP26 to help identify investment opportunities that benefit both gender equality and climate goals.
The EIB is making changes to how infrastructure is planned and delivered by ensuring that design serves the needs of both men and women equally. This helps create jobs and boost women’s income, leading to more stable local economies.
Women remain significantly underrepresented in the transport sector, highlighting the need for targeted action. A new report examines these barriers and ways to close the gender gap.
To support the EU Gender Strategy and Sustainable Development Goals, We have created a Gender and Social Advisory Initiative. This initiative ensures that new infrastructure projects benefit women and make urban infrastructure accessible to all.
2024 by the numbers
43 projects financed
that significantly contributed to gender equality and women’s economic empowerment across the globe
€387 million
in direct support of women’s economic empowerment through financial intermediaries
€2.95 billion
for projects that support gender equality in the bioeconomy, digital, education, energy, health, mobility, urban development and water sectors
Our strategy
The EIB Group has a Strategy on Gender Equality and Women’s Economic Empowerment and a Gender Action Plan. The Bank aims to embed gender equality and, in particular women’s economic empowerment in the EIB’s business model.
The strategy applies to EIB’s activities worldwide and focuses on three thematic areas of action:
Women Climate Leaders Network
Women’s Solutions Reporting Award
The 2X Challenge
