Co-founder & Managing Director of Indonesia TAEL Partners
While recognised as one of the most influential investors in the country, Ati Sugiharti keeps a low-profile. She does not boast about her thirty-year long successful career, or about her philanthropic activities. This is reflected in her stance on women’s empowerment: not placing women on a podium but rather on sound financial footing.
When Ati started her career in the early 1990s, business women in Indonesia roughly fell into two kinds: the heirs of family businesses, and the “wanita karir” (career women), who had mostly pursued advanced education abroad. Ati graduated in Indonesia, and has continuously worked in her home country ever since; mostly for foreign banking institutions that were extending their footprint in the Southeast Asian market. She flourished in a multicultural environment, where women were not only tolerated but also encouraged. This has shaped Ati’s strong and independent mindset.
By the late 2000s, a new professional group of self-made “entrepreneurs” emerged in Indonesia, driven by a growing hype around tech innovation. Ati co-founded her own private equity management firm, TAEL Partners. But in this flourishing community, most women did not have the necessary social and economic resources to join the world of the other growth-driven Indonesian entrepreneurs. As a result, resource-deprived women have been historically underrepresented, or mostly remained into the pool of informal workers.
Ati does not describe herself as a “feminist”, and she places more value on the investing discipline than bold risk-taking. But she acknowledges the persisting gender imbalance in some segments of the economy, and is clear about the potential of entrepreneurship as a great gender equalizer. When her friend Ibu Noni Purnomo (a successful CEO) brought Ati into the ANGIN’s Women Fund, she was as much attracted by the idea of supporting entrepreneurship, as providing the necessary tools and know-how to fearless women. The Fund was not just about filling a funding gap. With the other co-funders, they leveraged their collective expertise to build a comprehensive mentoring program for the investees. Ati, shared her 20 years of experience in financial institutions to help them build strong financials. For her, the success of Burgreens, one of the Fund’s investees and Indonesian first plant-based restaurant chain, lies more in its strong financial grounds than in its women’s leadership. This implies that women are naturally capable of managing their enterprises, even when the gender lens for women’s leadership per se is not emphasized.
Ati believes that women’s economic empowerment cannot go without the groundwork of capacity building. It is crucial to make sure that women are equipped with the know-how and the skills to establish a business from scratch. “We have to encourage women, but business is business. It is not because you are a woman that you should have a privilege” she states with a down-to-earth tone. Funding opportunities have to be more systematically connected to skills transfer, which could be done by better leveraging community approaches. The peer-to-peer lending fintech enterprise Amartha, for instance, provides loans not to individuals, but to a group of women: this allows them to carry each other where needed and has significantly improved the default rate.
Impact investing requires investors to value the benefits that are not as easily quantified as their expected annual Return on Investment (RoI). But not being profit-driven doesn’t have to entail that the initiative is not profitable. “People talk a lot about impact investing, but they are still looking for a 20% RoI. One cannot have its cake and eat it too: investors have to admit the idea that a 5% annual RoI is acceptable” Ati says.
The adage ”teach a poor man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”, is deep-seated within Ati’s mind. It fits both market-oriented supporters and social business advocates. The only problem is that we have long forgotten to picture a woman instead. And to give her access to the fish pond. Ati is one of those who is discretely feminizing the proverb within high financial spheres.
