FinDev Canada

Organizational profile:

FinDev Canada is Canada’s development finance institution. FinDev Canada offers financial solutions to the private sector in developing countries with the potential to create jobs, empower women and mitigate climate change. FinDev Canada is a wholly owned subsidiary of Export Development Canada. 

FinDev Canada supports businesses in developing country markets with financial services such as investments, loans and guarantees. Additionally, through the Technical Assistance Facility, FinDev works with clients to deepen their abilities to transform, deliver more value to end customers, and increase their competitive edge.

FinDev Canada supports businesses that operate in the areas of sustainable infrastructure, the agribusiness value chain and the financial industry. In the case of the financial industry, support is intended as a means to reach local small and medium-sized enterprises.

Climate action is one of FinDev Canada’s three development impact goals and plays a key role in the realization of its mandate. As part of its climate change strategy, FinDev has worked to steer capital towards low-carbon and climate-resilient transactions. This has investments in forestry and forest-related assets.

Financing Instrument: Loans, Guarantees, Direct and Indirect Equity Investments

Project scale: Recent forestry-related investments have included a $7.5 million investment in a growth equity fund focused on acquiring and developing environmentally friendly forestry value chain assets, as well as a 12 million investment to expand commercial timber operations and climate change mitigation in West Africa.

Applicable geographical regions/country groups: Latin America, the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa

Eligibility Criteria:

Eligible business partners should be able to answer these questions in the affirmative:

• Are you a private sector entity (i.e. not a government entity)?
• Does your business operate in Latin America? The Caribbean? Sub-Saharan Africa?
• Does your project or company currently generate, or is it projected to generate, sufficient return in order to be able to repay debt or provide a return on investment?
• Does your business operate in a FinDev Canada priority sector, i.e. sustainable infrastructure, agribusiness, or financial services?
• Can you demonstrate the ability to have an impact on economic and social development in the host country through market development (i.e. job creation), a contribution to women’s economic empowerment, or climate action?

Application guidelines:

Proposals can be directly submitted to FinDev Canada by sending an email to info@findevcanada.ca or by filling out the contact form: https://www.findevcanada.ca/en/contact

FinDev Canada incorporates development impact as the primary element of its investment process, all the way from pre-screening through to due diligence, approval, monitoring and reporting. A company’s current and potential contribution to FinDev’s three impact goals is a critical factor in the decision-making process, alongside robust analysis of risk, return and pricing. FinDev has established a 4-step development impact management cycle that is embedded in the organizational investment process: 

1. Pre-screening
- Checking impact eligibility and fit
- Estimating performance potential on impact goals
2. Due diligence
- Quantifying current and expected impact
- Agreeing on impact actions, KPIs and targets
3. Monitoring
- Tracking client level impact
- Performing internal/ external impact assessments
4. Reporting
-Publishing aggregated impact results of portfolio
- Sharing impact analytics with clients for business improvement

Last updated: 13 September 2023