The Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America (LAVCA) awarded ALIVE its 2023 Gender & Diversity Responsibility award in recognition of our investment in, and post-investment support of, Symplifica.
Symplifica is a Colombian platform providing payroll management solutions for household workers. Their mission is to formalize those workers, with a focus on the 20 million people in Latin America working under informal labor conditions, 93% of whom are women.
By offering a comprehensive platform for those workers and their employers, Symplifica ensures compliance with labor laws for employers while securing legally mandated benefits for workers, including health insurance and pensions. The company has also launched a platform where domestic workers can access additional benefits for the first time, such as payroll advances, loans, training, education, among others.
To date, the company has about 13,000 active subscriptions – mainly represented by women (95%) under 45 years old (51%) – and has formalized over 32,000 job contracts since its founding.
The LAVCA Annual Awards recognize ways in which fund managers are driving improvements, impact and growth in partnership with their portfolio’s company leadership.
Winners were chosen based on the transformations led by fund managers in collaboration with the portfolio company.
ALIVE's Virgilio Barco and Laura Muñoz accepting the award at LAVCA's award ceremony.
ALIVE's post investment support in gender equality
As part of ALIVE’s post-investment support, we provide portfolio companies with technical assistance to improve their gender inclusion practices Symplifica's business model intrinsically has a tremendous impact on women as more than 90% of the company’s subscriptions are women. Moreover, the company is not only formalizing the employment of thousands of women, but also empowering them by giving them access to benefits such as education and access to financing.
So, when we launched a gender integration project in collaboration with Value for Women, the first step was to adapt the project to the company's context and business model. After conducting an initial gender assessment of the company, a number of initiatives were defined as the focus of the technical assistance.
Over a period of about six months, ALIVE and Value for Women worked with Symplifica to refine and formalize company policies which promote gender inclusion, including their recruitment and selection policy, and family support, sexual harassment, and gender-based violence policies.
In addition, the company formalized its gender committee, in which ALIVE actively participates, in order to measure progress on gender initiatives, continue to identify gender disparities that may arise in the company, and to implement internal initiatives which promote diversity and inclusion.
ALIVE’s co-founder and managing partner, Virgilio Barco, shares:
“We are extremely proud to be an investor in Symplifica, a company that is generating enormous impact by – on the one hand -– ensuring that domestic workers in Latin America are formally employed and receive all mandated social security benefits, and – on the other hand – providing employers with the peace of mind that they are compliant with labor laws. Symplifica is led by two visionary entrepreneurs who have built a highly scalable, SAAS based business model that is rapidly becoming a market leader.”
ALIVE strongly believes that diversity and inclusion are a strength, especially with regards to gender equality. Symplifica is one example of the work we do as a fund to continue to advance gender equality through our investments in, and accompaniment of, portfolio companies.
See the full announcement and list of other LAVCA award winners here.