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 that benefit from this 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 2023 to 2025, 16 banks are receiving support on gender mainstreaming activities such as carrying out institutional gender gap analyses, developing gender policies and strategies, and integrating a gender-lens in internal and client-facing operations of the DFIs. These banks are:
From 2020 to 2022, we worked in depth with the following seven DFIs:
The topics chosen by the partner banks vary. For example, we supported the Development Bank of Rwanda in finalising their accreditation to the GCF 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.
Learn more about our support to DFIs by clicking on the video below:
The DFI exchange group is a space for DFIs to share and showcase their best practices and experiences with their peers.
On this page, you can access more information on our DFI exchange group as well as download past training materials and presentations shared during sessions.
The ICR Facility disseminates good practices and lessons learned and promotes dialogue and knowledge-sharing between national and regional institutions as well as between geographical regions.
We publish reports and studies and share thematic resources which can be found on our resources page. This page also includes links to recordings and materials of past webinars.
The ICR Facility has developed a self-paced training specifically designed for representatives from DFIs so that they can learn or strengthen how to develop a gender finance approach in their institution.
