Building Regional Collaboration: The Latin America Example
The Seedstars Summit is fast approaching and during this crazy day of discussions and pitches and amazing speakers, we’ll be taking a closer look into regional collaboration. When spread across 4 regions, 54 countries and over a 100 local languages, it becomes an interesting challenge to expand across countries. Together with our partner from the Inter-American Development Bank, we’ll be discussing about Latin America, a region quite homogenous in terms of language with the exception of Brazil and which shares quite a bit of history, during the workshop about Fostering Regional Collaboration.
We had a quick chat with Marcelo Cabrol, General Manager of External Relations at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to understand their vision of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Could you give us a quick overview of how is the IDB structured and what is its focus?
The IDB has been active for almost 60 yrs to work with governments and the private sector in Latin-America and the Caribbean to help the region develop sustainably. As a bank, we lent $12billion dollars last year to public institutions and private initiatives for long term projects. We want to fund projects that regular banking can’t cover. Our newly created Inter-American Investment Corporation will also facilitate working with the private sector, which we continuously try to connect with.
We’re also looking to bridge the gap between citizens and governments. With technology providing new services and better channels to citizens, they are demanding more from a government, which are not always prepared to face such new changes. We aim to help governments improve their regulatory framework to better integrate such services, the Uber example is the most common: across the region, the regulation is different in all countries, unclear and within a grey area of operations. We can help governments change this and thus allow entrepreneurs to more easily develop while improving access to such services to the citizens.
What kind of entrepreneurs is the IDB looking for and how does it support them?
We look for entrepreneurs and innovators looking to improve lives. We have an early-stage equity group and have helped around 80 funds in Latin America and the Caribbean to develop and improve the investment atmosphere in the region.
We’re also looking for companies looking to solve local problems such as mobility, education and we want to encourage entrepreneurs to venture into these heavily regulated areas by championing their cause. We are looking for high risk endeavors that look to solve day-to-day problems and not just spinoffs of successful services. As for innovation, we also want to help these new services be integrated into government services to improve the citizens’ life and foster innovative public structures. These services need to be market tested solutions as profitability is quite important for us so the company may be long lasting and produce jobs.
What are the main issues the IDB has detected in LATAM and how could regional collaboration help solve these issues?
It’s highly linked to services provided in part by the public sector: quality of education, healthcare, infrastructure,etc. There are already quite a lot of initiatives in place in Latin America and the Caribbean, governments are creating citizen labs, and there are a reasonable number of accelerators and incubators in the private sector and some supported by the public sector. However, what we’re lacking in the region is a network connecting all these initiatives and facilitate two points:
- Replication of the solutions across the region
- Connecting the public and private sector regionally
The regional collaboration is mostly on the government side, we’ve supported the creation of new networks such as the Alianza del Pacifico for regional integration and creation of an environment fostering innovation.
We’re still missing a heterogenous effort from the region itself: in Latin America, most of the governments are still unorganized in terms of structure. It makes it more complicated as well for companies to understand how to work with the public sector and benefit from their support regionally. One of our first projects to solve this is the platform Connect Americas for innovators looking for business opportunities in the region.
We’re looking forward to exploring different solutions during the workshop in Seedstars Summit, where we’ll be discussing with governments, entrepreneurs and ecosystem leaders how to best foster this regional collaboration.
