The D.F.C. Gets Ready to Become a G.F.C. Accredited Entity
The Development Finance Corporation is on its way to become a Green Climate Fund accredited entity. It means that the D.F.C. will be able to provide access to funding for climate resilient related activities and investments. But before they become accredited, they must meet certain standards to be able to disburse funding. And so through the G.C.F., under the Ministry of Finance, Economic Development and Investment and the Caribbean Development Bank, the D.F.C. was granted just under a million dollars to build its capacity over the next twelve to fourteen months. Franklyn Magloire of the D.F.C. tells us what it means for D.F.C. to become accredited as a Direct Access Entity of the G.C.F.
On the Phone: Franklyn Magloire, Chief Strategist & Climate Champion, D.F.C.
“Somewhere around 2015-2016, we started to experience the impacts of climate change on our loan portfolio. We have heavy investments in agriculture and so whenever there is an event – a drought, a storm, flood like we have seen in the last couple of weeks and it always results in losses to farmers which translate into defaults in loan payments. So, in 2017 we did a new strategy and one of the main strategies outlined in that plan is that we were going to mainstream climate in our operations. One of the things we recognized that we needed to do is to mobilize finance, concessionary finance for funding adaptation and mitigation measures in the productive sector. So, what has happened since then after the gap assessment, the Caribbean Development Bank which is a regional institution that has worked with DFC for many years as our primary funding source, they agreed to assist us with addressing the gaps that were identified from the GCF gap assessment and so we got together with the GCF and we prepared a funding proposal. That proposal was recently approved in the first week of December. So, coming out of that we will now get technical assistance funding to do consultancies regional and even national consultancies that will help us plug in those gaps and once we address those gaps, the process to accreditation of the GCF will now be accelerated. We will finalize our application and then we will now be able to go directly to the GCF for funding for projects up to forty million US dollars; small for GCF but large for a country like Belize. So, in terms of the DFC, it is going to create an additional non-traditional source of funding for the productive sector and in terms of the country of Belize it is going to attract what we call foreign capital for financing investments in the country but not just investments, climate smart investments.”
Currently, there are only two accredited G.C.F. entities in Belize; the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center and the Protected Areas for Conservation Trust.
