Co-funded by the European Union
Co-funded by the European Union
The ICR Facility provides technical assistance to national and sub-regional development finance institutions (DFIs) in African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to become stronger institutions and to identify, prepare and implement projects and investments with high development impact, especially related to women’s economic empowerment (WEE) and gender-lens investing (GLI). Since 2020, over 50 DFIs have benefitted from our support.
The ICR Facility periodically selects DFIs which then benefit from tailor-made technical assistance, capacity building and advisory services.
Each bank chooses the topics and forms of assistance based on its strategic priorities. Where possible, activities targeted towards a specific DFI are opened to other banks in order to facilitate knowledge sharing and peer exchange.
From 2020 to 2022, we worked in depth with six DFIs:
The topics of support are chosen directly by the banks. For example, we supported the Development Bank of Rwanda with their accreditation to the Green Climate Fund and their monitoring and evaluation. For the Development Bank of Samoa, we provided support in credit risk management, customer relations, innovative financing for MSMEs, and climate finance.
In 2022, the ICR Facility published a Call for Proposals with a special focus on providing support on women’s economic empowerment and gender-lens investing issues. Following this Call for Proposals, a new set of banks has been identified to receive support from 2023 to 2025 on gender mainstreaming activities such as carrying out institutional gender gap analyses, developing gender policies and strategies, and integrating agender-lens in internal and client-facing operations of the DFIs.
The ICR Facility also provides demand-based technical assistance on investment climate reform and policy dialogue to improve the business environment.
DFIs can apply for short-term technical assistance of up to 90 expert days from the ICR Facility on topics related to business environment and investment climate reform, advocacy with policymakers, public-private dialogue formats and improving the existing legal/ institutional frameworks and policies for public-private partnerships. Requests can include for instance:
As for all interventions of the ICR Facility, requests for support should include a strong gender focus.
Find out more about our previous and ongoing interventions with DFIs!
