CARTIER

For the 2025 edition, the Cartier Women’s Initiative will proudly host another Impact Awards edition, dedicated to former fellows who have achieved extraordinary impact over the years.

Our regional and thematic awards recognize and fund talented impact entrepreneurs from around the world who are leveraging business as a force for good.

The fellowship aims to provide our fellows with peer-, industry-, and academic-based educational programming for skills and leadership development and business growth.

The community gives fellows lifelong access to a vibrant group of impact leaders, creating opportunities for engagement, relationship-building, and the development of social capital.

We aim to drive an active conversation about women impact entrepreneurs through content curation and research partnerships.

The best thing you can do in business is to empower women. It changes everything.

Chairman of Cartier Culture & Philanthropy

We are constantly looking for ways to extend opportunities to more impact entrepreneurs worldwide. Here are some exciting updates.

In 2022, we launched the CWI Loan Fund, managed by Beneficial Returns. The fund provides loans up to $200,000 to fellows in select geographies at preferential interest rates, in order to accelerate their growth and post-COVID recovery, enhance financial resiliency and prepare them for conventional investors.

For the 2023 edition, we added two new regional categories: Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania.

For the 2023 edition, we launched the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award, which was been created to encourage entrepreneurial solutions designed to close gaps of access, outcome or opportunities for communities that have been underrepresented or underserved. While the other regional and thematic awards of the Cartier Women’s Initiative focus on supporting women, this pilot award is open to all genders.

To mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Cartier Women’s Initiative, we look back on the program’s evolution and its impact. Going forward, our role is to create a global coalition of allies that can amplify that impact by leveraging our unique strengths: our community of fellows, our knowledge of the ecosystem, and our ability to activate different players in the space.

To assess the impact of the program, we fielded an online survey to our former fellows. Here are some key takeaways.

Fellows overwhelmingly reported that the program boosted their self-confidence (90%) and gave them a sense of belonging (90%). They also frequently cited improvements in visibility (78%) and business strategy (66%).

Many fellows successfully pivoted during the pandemic and emerged stronger than ever. Ninety percent of surveyed businesses were still in operation in 2020 and thirty percent of businesses reached more than 10,000 users.

Fifty-three percent of fellows surveyed report providing a product or service that is new to the world and 25% offer a product or service that is new in their country.

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