A letter from Philippe Le Houérou, IFC CEO

Ideas matter

Ideas matter. They matter most when they are used to raise living standards and confront the largest challenges to human development. Seemingly small ideas — an innovative business that just needs a loan to get started — can change lives and lift families out of poverty. Other ideas are bigger. They can create thriving markets that bring jobs and prosperity to entire regions.

That’s what this inaugural issue of IFC PERSPECTIVES is all about — ideas with the potential to rewrite the rules of development. Achieving that potential isn’t easy. It takes years of hard work and refinement to build a good idea into something that’s capable of helping the world’s most vulnerable.

Some of the ideas you’ll read about in these pages are brought to life by first-time entrepreneurs who are benefiting from the Women Entrepreneurs Opportunity Facility, a partnership between IFC’s Banking on Women program and Goldman Sachs’s 10,000 Women. Four years in, the program has invested almost $1 billion in 26 emerging market countries. In our exclusive cover interview, Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs, discusses the impact of the initiative.

Other ideas — like the rapidly expanding market for green bonds — are in full bloom and are having great impact on the world.

In fact, we are living in the decade of green bonds. In 2007, green bonds were non-existent. One decade later, in 2017, $155 billion in green bonds were issued around the world. And that number is rising dramatically as global capital markets accelerate the fight against climate change.

IFC is proud to play a role. We’ve partnered with Amundi on the world’s largest targeted green bond fund focused on emerging markets, which creates both supply and demand, an initiative you can read more about in this issue. Our recent Climate Business Report found that more than $1 trillion in investment is already flowing into climate-related projects every year. Yet trillions more are needed.

We created this quarterly magazine because of the great need for a platform to discuss the private sector’s role in addressing the biggest development challenges of our time. Future issues will feature stories on blockchain technology, correspondent banking, and employer supported childcare. IFC PERSPECTIVES will publish the most innovative ideas in private sector development wherever they reside — from IFC, from our clients, from think-tanks and universities, from other development institutions, from the IMF and from our internal partners across the World Bank Group. The goal is simple: to provoke a conversation about what’s possible in a complex and ever-changing world — for the benefit of the people we serve.

Let us know what you think. We look forward to your feedback.

Philippe Le Houérou
CEO, International Finance Corporation

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Originally published at www.ifc.org.