Impact Investment Lead at ANGIN
Atika is passionate about bridging people and building capacity for both investors and entrepreneurs. Always striving for impact, Atika has learned how to educate the market on defining and incorporating a gender lens.
Being the only female among three siblings, the family always turned to Atika whenever they needed to make a decision. It created the perfect soil for Atika’s confidence and character to grow.
Upon graduation from Prasetiya Mulya University, Atika started working at a financial services enterprise in Indonesia. She used to work with large corporations and the public equity market as part of her role as an equity analyst. It wasn’t until 2015 that the 28-year-old was made aware of conversations around social impact. The media was buzzing with a clash between online motorcycle taxi provider app Go-Jek and conventional taxi enterprise Blue Bird, spotlighting the role of startups and impact creation to improve communities’ livelihoods.
Her closest circles, who are mostly women entrepreneurs, also increased her awareness about the issue and motivated her to learn more about small-medium enterprises development. With this objective, she pursued a Master’s degree in Australia under sponsorship from the Australian government, where Atika learned more about business strategy, impact investment and social enterprises. The experience during her study also gave her a better understanding about equality.
Upon returning to Indonesia, Atika joined ANGIN to get first-hand experience in driving impact. Since she started, she has been in charge of any social impact-related projects and investment opportunities. She meets entrepreneurs and connects them to investors within the ANGIN network.
Atika is heavily involved in workshops and training, including sessions with women-owned social enterprises and social impact-driven businesses. She also mentors and supports them to fundraise.
Although there is a growing trend of investors pledging capital to women entrepreneurs, Atika finds that the unconscious biases towards women entrepreneurs persist. Many say women entrepreneurs have “different traits”. For example, if they are being assertive, they will be called “aggressive”. If they are being realistic, they will be perceived as giving too low of a valuation or projection. This kind of perception heavily impacts fundraising activities, making it difficult for women entrepreneurs to access capital with fair terms.
Currently, Atika is working on the development of ANGIN’s online investment platform targeting small and medium enterprises that are mostly in consumer goods in the women’s market. Atika also works to encourage more women investors to join ANGIN network.
“ANGIN is a big player in contributing to raise the awareness of GLI. Our unique position in both investment and advisory services, research, and, in part, advocacy can help educate the market about how to define and look at the gender lens,” she says.
For Atika, GLI is best described when one incorporates gender empowerment in the whole investment process, before and post investment: either by looking at the investees or how the potential investments could leverage value to women either from the product or leadership. It should also consider governance policies to support entrepreneurs to accommodate gender empowerment, such as equal paternity and maternity leave to balance out the gender roles.
While Atika sees high potential from women investors, GLI can also be about bringing men investors to the same conversation. “I always say that the gender lens is not always about women (exclusively),” Atika says.
Same goes for the demand side. When GLI ceases to be exclusively about women entrepreneurs, there are actually quite a lot of investable opportunities in Indonesia, especially if you consider the smaller ticket sizes. They could be solutions benefiting both women and men to support gender balance.
In her position at ANGIN, Atika is one of the key figures defining what GLI should and could be. She is highly influential thanks to her unique position in between supply and demand sides and will use that as an advantage to further educate and shape the market.
