The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved a $37 million loan to improve public investment efficiency at different government levels to promote economic and social development in Argentina.

This program will increase the availability of viable, shovel-ready public investment projects; reduce coverage gaps and promote territorial equity; and increase the efficiency of state actors by improving their capacity to manage the public investment project cycle of national, provincial, and municipal governments.

The loan will help strengthen the public investment cycle at the Secretariat of Strategic Affairs, the Ministry of Public Works, and the Ministry of the Interior – key agencies in this sector. To this end, the program will support strategic pre-investment management and development of strategic pre-investment studies with a focus on climate resilience and low greenhouse gas emissions.

The initiative will also strengthen the management of national, provincial and municipal public investment, financing pre-investment studies, studies to identify the climate vulnerability of works, adaptation and greenhouse gas emission reduction measures, and the design and implementation of a strategy to strengthen the project cycle.

Among other specific actions, the program will support the Ministry of Public Works’ Digital Transformation Plan, expand the MapaInversiones platform, and identify public investments with a climate impact. It will also support incorporating a gender perspective to pre-investment studies and applying gender-disaggregated indicators that favor decision-making in the development of policies with this perspective.

The loan will improve the Federal Development Plan’s pre-investment capacity by generating a portfolio of projects for the 23 provinces and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and finance activities such as pre-investment studies and projects as well as evaluations of investment outcomes.

This operation is in line with Vision 2025 - Reinvesting in the Americas: A Decade of Opportunity, created by the IDB to achieve recovery and inclusive growth in Latin America and the Caribbean, in the areas of digital economy, gender and inclusion, and climate change.

The $37 million IDB loan has a 25-year maturity, a 5.5-year grace period, an interest rate based on SOFR, and $6.5 million in local counterpart funds.