GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador – The President of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Luis Alberto Moreno, signed four agreements today to promote savings, women’s entrepreneurial activity, and the work of socially focused enterprises that are providing basic services. Two of these agreements will benefit Ecuador.
The agreements were signed at the Inter-American Forum on Microenterprise (Foromic), the premier conference in Latin America and the Caribbean on issues related to microfinance and micro and small enterprises. This year, the event is taking place in Guayaquil, Ecuador, November 4–6, with the theme “Inclusive Finance: Business Models That Work for All.”
The agreements, which will benefit Ecuador, Mexico, and Latin America and the Caribbean in general, will be financed by the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), a member of the IDB Group.
Projects in Ecuador
Moreno signed the first agreement with Ecuador’s Savings and Credit Cooperative of the Small Enterprises of Pastaza (CACPE Pastaza), for a project that will expand the commitment savings products that the cooperative now offers in urban areas, to rural areas. This will be a “door-to-door” savings program for low-income people, mainly women, who live in rural areas and who include a large number of beneficiaries of a Human Development Benefit (BDH) conditional cash transfer program.
The project will seek to benefit 13,000 low-income people, including at least 5,000 women receiving government payments, in Ecuador’s provinces of Pastaza, Morona Santiago, and Orellana.
This project is part of the MIF’s ProSavings program, which promotes the financial inclusion of low-income recipients of government payment programs in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Moreno signed the second agreement with Banco D-MIRO S.A., an Ecuadorian financial institution. The approved project will seek to promote women’s entrepreneurial activity in Ecuador, with the goal of increasing sales and net job creation for 3,000 small and growing women-led businesses.
The project, which amounts to a little more than $6 million in total, will count on MIF financing of $1.9 million, as well as a technical assistance grant of $527,275. This project was designed as part of the women entrepreneurshipBanking initiative offered by the MIF and the IDB’s Structured and Corporate Finance Department, which provides incentive for financial intermediaries in Latin American and Caribbean to launch innovative lending models for women-led micro, small, and medium enterprises.
Moreno signed the third agreement with Raiffeisen Latina, a subsidiary of the German Confederation of Cooperatives with local experience in the savings and credit sector, for a project that will promote a savings culture among youth in Mexico. He also signed an agreement with Agora Partnerships, a global community committed to unleashing the power of entrepreneursin Latin America, for a project that will accelerate the growth of a group of 15 start-up social entrepreneurs in Latin America and the Caribbean whose business models are focused on providing basic services to the poorest people a segment also known as the Base of the Pyramid (BoP).
Visit Foromic’s live blog to learn more about these projects.