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 will help create jobs, promote women’s economic empowerment, and contribute to a cleaner and greener environment. By filling the gap between commercial support and development assistance, FinDev Canada will bring financial strength to businesses in developing markets that will in turn create stability and prosperity for local communities. It will support local private sector activity where it contributes to sustainable development. By providing support to businesses in developing countries, they intend to have a favourable impact on poverty reduction through job creation, women’s economic empowerment, and climate change action. FinDev Canada will achieve this by focusing on three priority sectors: agribusiness value chain, green growth, and the financial industry.

A key impact objective for FinDev Canada is to assist with the mitigation of and adaptation to the negative impacts of climate change. This is accomplished in one of two ways: Through our assessment of individual transactions for their environmental and social impacts and actions taken to reduce potentially negative impacts; and through the activities of certain transactions which have a specific objective of positively addressing climate change. This has included a contribution to an investment fund focused on forestry and forestry-related assets in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Financing Instrument: Equity, Loans, Guarantees

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.

Applicable geographical regions/country groups: Global

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. green growth (renewable energy, energy infrastructure, energy efficiency, water supply, water management, waste management, waste water management, bio-refinery products, green industrial production), agribusiness, or financial services?

- Can you demonstrate the ability to have an impact on economic and social development in the host country through job creation, a contribution to women’s economic empowerment, climate change mitigation or adaptation?

Application guidelines: Proposals can be directly submitted to FinDev Canada by sending an email to info@findevcanada.ca.

FinDev Canada’s development impact management process has 4 steps:

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

4. Reporting