How do we achieve equality for women by 2030?
Despite global progress towards gender equality, women around the world are still subject to discriminatory laws, unequal pay, lack of access to healthcare, education, business opportunities, and some cannot participate in financial and other decisions within their homes. At this rate, it will take us another 286 years to close the global gender gap (UN Women, 2022).
Despite these challenges, women play a critical role in driving economic growth and providing livelihoods for their communities, families, and society in general, through women- owned or operated business. In fact, ensuring equal opportunities for women will create an estimated $160 trillion in wealth from better use of their skills, experiences and ideas (World Bank, 2018). In fact, studies have found that women-owned startups deliver twice as much per dollar invested as those founded by men ( BCG and MassChallenge). For every dollar of funding in 2018, these startups generated 78 cents, doubling the return of male-founded startups. Nonetheless, female founders received just 2% of all venture capital dollars in the US in 2021, the lowest since 2016.
In partnership with One Young World, AB InBev and its flagship open innovation platform, the 100+ Accelerator, want to continue to support and promote women in business as women’s economic empowerment is crucial to realizing women’s rights, gender equality and driving sustainability. As stated by the UN: Investing in women’s entrepreneurship is investing in change.
AB InBev and 100+ Accelerator are proud to support the Lead2030 Challenge for SDG 5. The Challenge aims to find and support women-founded companies that are tackling the most pressing sustainability challenges we face: from climate change to biodiversity loss, to building a more inclusive world.
About CTRL Z
In adapting to climatic change and mitigating it’s impact on food and health security, availability of clean, usable water plays an important role. Waste water is often looked at as a liability, which needs to be treated in order to dispose it off. CTRL Z envisions a water positive world, where water recovery is optimised from industrial effluent streams, and reuse is prioritised.
CTRL Z is a pioneer in graphene-enabled wastewater treatment technologies. Dubbed as the nobel-winning ‘wonder material’, graphene has had issues penetrating the commercial water treatment space because of cost and production scalability issues. CTRL Z’s process solves them both, thus unlocking the potential of graphene for the purpose of treating difficult waste waters. With our platform technology, CTRL Z can cater to a range of industries, while decreasing the cost and energy requirements in water treatment. Our first product is a graphene-based adsorbent, which is in pilot.