DFC Secures Green Climate Fund Accreditation, Unlocking $100M per Project

In a major step for climate financing in Belize, the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) has been officially accredited by the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Through the accreditation, the DFC can now access up to 100 million Belize dollars per project or program. These funds will be available through a variety of financial instruments, including technical assistance, highly concessional loans, equities, and guarantees. Public and private sector entities will be able to access this funding for national projects that seek to fulfill Belize’s international climate change obligations and improve the quality of life for Belizeans. The DFC’s CEO, Henry Anderson, said the accreditation will play a key role in national development. 

Henry Anderson, CEO, Development Finance Corporation: “It’s big for Belize because the development bank of Belize, you will, we are now able to work with the other agencies and the private sector and the public sector to access climate financing at big levels for Belize to be able to strengthen the economy,  address the  existential climate threats that Belize faces, and in doing so improve the resilience of the country and obviously the quality of life for the Belizeans who will benefit. How this works is we’re looking at national projects, right? So as you know, Belize is a party to the Paris Agreement. Out of that we have  our national determined contributions, the commitments that Belize has made as part of that in terms of ensuring we don’t have increase temperatures by more than one and a half percent or two percent over time and how we move from fossil fuels to renewable energy and things of that nature. So what we will do is we will sit with the Ministry of Economic Transformation, Sustainable Development, look at all of those things and then how DFC will work, it’s based on stakeholder engagement. So once we identify areas, then we do stakeholder engagements. When I say we identify areas, it’s not necessarily DFC sitting by itself, no. But it can come from the private sector, the public sector or communities. We are now empowered to  look at financing transformative projects in several areas, right? Energy generation, energy access, building cities, industries, appliances, looking at the livelihoods of people and communities, looking at health and food and water security and looking at public, private and cross-cutting type projects.”

The certification is the culmination of a rigorous multi-year process that began in 2019. Anderson says that the accreditation is a testament to the work the DFC has done, but acknowledges that there’s still more work to do. 

Henry Anderson, CEO, Development Finance Corporation: “A lot of blood, sweat, and some tears went into this. I must thank my team. I will share with you that we got the phase two feedback in mid-March and we did not want to wait until the latter part of this year for our proposal to go to the GCF board. So we asked the question, by when would we have to give feedback for us to get a chance for the application to go to this board meeting? It wasn’t guaranteed by no means, because they have to look at the quality of the feedback. But we were told, okay, it’s mid-March if you can somehow answer us by the end of the first week in April, you may stand a chance. We answered on the second day, four o’clock in morning, the second day of that first week and we’re here now. We were told by the consultants working with us, that’s the fastest turnover they have ever, turnaround they’ve ever seen from phase two to accreditation. Very, very, very rigorous. Okay. And so what this means for DFC, if I can go back to that, besides being able to access financing from GCF it also speaks to the quality of and the credibility of what DFC is as a financial institution. We are one of maybe 200 handful in the entire world that is operating at this level. I can say the fact that we are accredited means it didn’t gather dust. We were actually doing them as, so we strengthened and modernized the governance framework of Belize at the highest levels that’s out there in the world. We can stand up with the best of them. That is the level that DFC works. Now we still have a long way to go in terms of the level of client service DFC is working to offer. Different conversation, but we’re doing a massive modernization of our core management systems that will leapfrog DFC to a digital first entity and by the end of the year.”

This landmark approval came on July 1st during the GCF’s 42nd board meeting held in Papua New Guinea. The DFC participated virtually in that meeting.