By Jorgelina do Rosario and Elisa Martinuzzi
LONDON (Reuters) – Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) President Ilan Goldfajn said the financial institution can expand its lending capacity to as much as $112 billion over a decade once it secures fresh capital from shareholders for its private arm.
A plan to increase capital by IDB Invest – the lender’s private sector arm – is set to be ratified at the bank’s annual meeting in March, Goldfajn told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Bank/IMF meetings in Marrakech on Wednesday.
“If we sum the efforts of the public side and the private side, we can go all the way from $34 billion together, up to $112 billion,” Goldfajn said.
Discussions around the capital raise are “going very well, because we are concentrating capitalization on the private (sector), which has models that tend to be well accepted.”
Goldfajn says that once commitments from member countries are secured, the challenge will be to ensure funds are being deployed. IDB Invest is owned by its 48 member countries, 26 of which are in the Latin American and Caribbean region.
Since taking over as IDB president Goldfajn has pledged to scale up financing for development amid a broad push by multi-lateral development banks to help countries brace for climate change and other economic challenges.
Experts say developing and emerging economies need $2.4 trillion per year to meet global climate-related costs.
(Reporting by Jorgelina do Rosario and Elisa Martinuzzi, editing by Karin Strohecker and Toby Chopra)
