/FairShare

Our platform encourages gender lens investing and makes funding more accessible to women, addressing gender inequality in finance.

Primary LanguageHTML

BANNER

Why FairShare?

  • A crowdfunding and investment platform that has been developed to make funding more accessible to women and encourage gender lens investing.
  • Only 15% of women received capital from venture capitalists in recent years and the growth rate of funding for female-founded companies has plateaued. Women entrepreneurs face greater challenges in accessing financial capital than men.
  • Crowdfunding is a viable alternative of funding for women entrepreneurs as trustworthiness is an important factor and people are more likely to support female entrepreneurs.
  • Gender lens scores should be included in companies' weighting in indices, including ESG-based indices. As female-run startups generated 78 cents in revenue for every dollar of investment raised, outperforming their male counterparts despite raising less money.

Who can use FairShare?

  1. Entrepreneurs looking for crowdfunding as an alternative of traditional funding.
  2. Investors/mentors looking to invest or give back to the community.

What it is capable of?

  1. Crowdfunding: FareShare is a crowdfunding platform (both equity and reward) for women-led businesses who seek alternative funding and an investment gateway for gender lens investing.
  2. Gender Lens Investing Gateway: Apart from investing in crowdfunding campaigns, investors are given avenues to diversify their investment via the gender equality funds list(source: genderequalityfunds.org, which is ranked by gender equality scores).
  3. Gender Toolkit: The app has a gender lens toolkit with three features:
    • Gender Lens Scorecard Test
    • Investor Risk Profiler
    • Media Analyzer using Natural Language Processing
  4. Benchmarking (Gender Equality Funds and Equity Index): The Gender Lens Mutual Fund features a list of mutual funds with their performances over the years and ranked based on the gender lens score.
  1. Dashboard and Login: The dashboard keeps track of and updates the user's crowdfunding campaigns and investments. The user can log in securely using an encrypted password or Google login.

Technology Stack

TECH

Setup

Dependencies

  • Run npm install in project directory. This will install server-related dependencies such as express.
  • cd client and run npm install. This will install client dependencies

Database Prep

  • Access the MySQL interface in your terminal by running mysql -u root -p
  • Create a new database called fairsharedb: create database fairsharedb;
  • Create a .env file in project directory and add
  DB_NAME=fairsharedb
  DB_PASS=YOURPASSWORD
  JWT_SECRET=YOURSECRET

  • Replace YOUR_PASSWORD with your actual password

  • Run npm run migrate in the main folder of this repository, in a new terminal window. This will create 4 tables (applications, events, organizations and users) in your database.

Run Your Development Servers

  • Run npm start in project directory to start the Express server on port 5000
  • cd client and run npm start to run your development build. The app will run on http://localhost:8080 as the default port.

Future Prospects

  • AI-advising which can be iterated on the gender lens scorecard and investor profiler.
  • AI/ML modelling that uses the quantitative data gathered from the platform and trains these models using unbiased data so women in finance have equal opportunity.
  • A networking platform for our app members to connect with bigger NGO/ other organizations with community projects

Creators

Invest in gender equality, change the world.