The Financial Opportunities of Sustainable Development

To help the financial sector of emerging markets seizing the opportunities created by sustainable development – and to foster environmental protection and social development – IFC trained numerous financial institutions in environmental and social risk assessment. Consultants were invited to participate to train them as trainers themselves and carry the workshops in the future.

Sustainable development is increasingly seen as a business opportunity by the financial sector of developing countries. There is an interest from financial institutions to seize the potential of this line of business.

This is why IFC created the Competitive Business Advantage program, delivered through its Sustainable Financial Markets Facility, to assist financial institutions in identifying environmental business opportunities and better understand why and how to manage environmental and social issues associated with their lending and investment operations. As these financial institutions take into account environmental and social risks in their lending portfolio, they influence the sustainability of the companies they invest in, thereby improving the environmental and social performance of the whole region.

Each workshop was a three-day event with many interactive sessions and each workshop included a site visit to a local company which provided the participants with a visible case study that demonstrated environmental opportunities.

The first four of these were held in March and April 2005 in Albania, Bosnia and Serbia, carried by IFC’s Sustainable Finance and the Southeast Europe Enterprise Development. With a strong focus on Energy Efficiency opportunities supported by trainers from IFC's Energy Efficiency team, these four events reached 48 institutions, and 70 participants.

IFC seized the opportunity created by these workshops to build local capacity to carry those trainings in the future by putting in place a “train-the-trainers” program. IFC invited 12 local environmental consultants who learnt how to provide after-care services to the financial institutions, thus ensuring the sustainability of the knowledge taught at the training sessions.

The whole Competitive Business Advantage training has proven its value and has thus been picked by IFC for mainstreaming into its training programs for financial institutions in emerging markets.