Date
24th March, 2022 - 24th March, 2022
Watch the recording
About the session
Blended/concessional finance is an important tool to mobilise private capital for sustainable infrastructure development. As awareness of the potential of blended finance has increased in the past 5 to 10 years, so have innovations around its use and new concessional resources.
IFC has found that “blended finance can support high-impact transformative projects in sectors that are initially unable to attract commercial finance but have the potential to become commercially viable over time” and further notes that although no one financing instrument is a ‘silver bullet’ solution, “blended finance has the potential to be a catalytic part of many solutions”.
Topics will include:
- What innovations in commercial financing are making it easier to invest?
- What government policies help enable blended finance transactions?
- How can the involvement of the private sector help achieve the public sector’s broader sustainability objectives?
- What are the requirements for raising concessional finance?
- What are the opportunities for green infrastructure?
Our panel will explore the topics outlined above, and illustrate these with lessons learned on two recent projects:
- World Bank Group's Scaling Mini-grid: Mini-grids are a cost-effective way to provide low-cost, reliable, and clean power to communities in sub-Saharan Africa that are out of reach of existing power grids. New attention from international institutions like IFC is expected to help expand private investment in mini-grids and help provide access to the 573 million people in the region who lack access to electricity.
- Daystar Nigeria: Daystar Power provides hybrid solar power solutions to businesses in West Africa. By expanding its installed solar capacity to 140MW by 2024, it will serve more Nigerian businesses in the financial services, manufacturing, and agricultural sectors with clean and affordable power. Enabling this expansion, IFC in June 2021 committed a seven-year US$20 million junior debt package to Daystar Nigeria, comprising a local currency subordinated loan of up to USD10 million equivalent hedged through cross-currency swaps with IDA Private Sector Window Local Currency Financing, and up to USD10 million concessional subordinated loan from the Canada-IFC Renewable Energy Program for Africa.
Learn more about the projects:
Moderators
- Maud de Vautibault, Director of Practical Tools and Knowledge, GI Hub
- Linda Munyengeterwa, Regional Industry Director of Infrastructure Middle East and Africa, IFC
Panellists
- Jasper Graf von Hardenberg, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Daystar Power
- Fiona Gulliford, Trinity LLP, Former Legal Counsel for Daystar
- Yann Tanvez , Team Lead – Infrastructure West and Central Africa and Mini-Grids Africa, IFC, World Bank Group
- Orli Arav, Managing Director and Head of Debt Funds at Lion’s Head Global Partners
