Multilateral Data Collaboration to Support Emerging Markets

By Alain Godard

Before the COVID-19 crisis, the international community was facing a huge question: how to crowd in sufficient private sector capital to address the twin challenges climate change and sustainable development. MDBs’ own experiences over the years have shown that well-structured, sustainable, long-term, patient investment does pay off. But the challenge remained of how to demonstrate this to others and encourage much more of “the right kind” of investment, particularly in emerging markets and developing economies.

Many things hold back investment in partner countries (political risk, weak legal environments, regulatory uncertainties or penalties, lack of standardisation, weakly structured projects and/or weak deal flow, in spite of huge latent demand) all of which can lead to prohibitively high upfront costs for investors thinking about entering such markets.

Over the last 60 years the international community has relied on a range of multilateral and national development banks and institutions to do much of the heavy lifting associated with providing non-domestic finance to critical projects in these geographies. Over that time, our institutions built up often unique expertise and knowledge about how such investments perform and what investors can expect when they enter such…