Governments are doing the right thing by helping millions of women who lost their jobs during the crisis and now need to acquire new skills to re-enter the labor market. But they can also boost the recovery by addressing the needs of a small but highly strategic segment of women who have never stopped working: the owners and managers of 1.3 million small and medium-sized enterprises in the region.

To put it another way, these leaders operate one-third of the SMEs in our countries, so their success is incumbent on all of us.

Their businesses faced all kinds of obstacles even before the pandemic. The biggest has always been lack of access to credit due to gender bias.

Many studies show that women entrepreneurs have more trouble getting bank loans, even though they are more likely to repay them than their male counterparts.

Financing is especially vital for women entrepreneurs in the technology field. Prior to 2020, this industry was growing rapidly in the region.

According to a survey conducted last year by IDB Lab, the Inter-American Development Bank's innovation lab, among 405 women-led startups, more than 80% of them had been created in the last five years and almost 70% had hired at least two employees.

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents said that difficulties in raising capital had limited their opportunities to create and develop their businesses. Forty-four percent obtained financing from very close sources such as personal savings, family friends.

A similar percentage obtained resources from "angel" investors, accelerators or business incubators, including those of state origin.

Although the availability of this last type of venture capital has been growing slowly, it is still too scarce for the region's needs. In the case of women-led SMEs, the financing gap is estimated at some US$93 billion, according to the International Finance Corporation.

The good news is that many women entrepreneurs have overcome these difficulties with creativity and determination. With their passion for adding customers and breaking into new markets, they represent precisely the kind of income- and job-generating enterprises that our countries desperately need.

Helping these entrepreneurs would benefit all of us, not just women. The credits of empowering women in business, as well as employing more women, are enormous. Just equalizing the earnings of men and women in the workforce could increase regional GDP by 23%, adding more than $1 trillion to regional income by 2025.

I don’t know other economic policy measure capable of delivering such an impactful rate of return on investment.

That is why empowering women is critical to the future of the region.

Achieving this on a large scale will require a concerted effort by the public and private sectors. Fortunately, there is no shortage of opportunities to achieve good results.

The report Closing Gender Gaps in the World of Work shows how the IDB has integrated a gender perspective into its operations. By 2020, 38% of operations contained elements to reduce gender gaps, and that figure is growing with new interventions designed exclusively to address the problem.

Among the latter, the Ciudad Mujer project in El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, as well as Bolivia and Paraguay in South America, stand out for their success.

In february, IDB Invest, the IDB's private arm, worked with Banco Nacional de Costa Rica to issue the country's first social bond for a total of $75 million. Forty percent of the issue will be used to finance MSMEs led by women.

In addition, public and private sector authorities should encourage large companies to promote professional development and female leadership among their staff.

In the Dominican Republic, with support from IDB Invest, Banco BDH León recently became the first private company in the Antilles to begin the process of obtaining the prestigious EDGE certification, which evaluates corporate efforts to close the gender gap. All large companies in Central Central America should follow suit.

The IDB is expanding its financial and technical support for these types of initiatives as part of Vision 2025, a roadmap for achieving a sustainable and inclusive recovery. By collaborating with the public and private sectors, we can dramatically boost female entrepreneurship, creating quality jobs that will benefit the region for decades to come.

We just need more allies. Together we can do it.

*President of the Inter-American Development Bank, based in Washington D.C., the main source of financing for Latin America and the Caribbean.