Newsletter n°42: review of an eventful quarter

An eventful second quarter for I&P and its partner funds! In this edition of our newsletter, you will find : 

⇒ Focus on: the 9th Annual Entrepreneurs' Seminar, which brought together 60 African entrepreneurs;

⇒ What to take away from the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact ? An op-ed signé Jean-Michel Severino;

⇒ Portrait of Douglas Baguma, Co-Founder of Innovex in Uganda ;

 Open the Newsletter

Opinion

Two key takeaways from the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact (and its implications for African SMEs?)

Signed Jean-Michel Severino

After holding the position of Chairman of Investisseurs & Partenaires (I&P) between 2011 and 2021, Jean-Michel Severino chairs the Supervisory Board of I&P since October 2021. 
Jean-Michel Severino is a Senior Fellow at Ferdi and Director of the Ferdi Chair on Impact Investing and a member of the Chair's working group on the international architecture of development finance. 

On June 22 and 23, a Summit for a New Global Financial Pact was held in Paris, attended by numerous heads of state from both industrialized and developing countries, and convened by French President Emmanuel Macron. The summit was an opportunity for us to meet many of our partners. We played a major role in the intellectual preparations for the summit, in partnership with FERDI, thanks to the Impact Chair with which we collaborate.

The summit was not a negotiating forum: all the subjects it addressed are dealt with in processes under the aegis of the G2O, the Bretton-Woods institutions or the United Nations, among others. But it did enable a wide-ranging exchange of ideas on how to make the management of our planet's common affairs fairer.

Two sets of ideas that are particularly important to us were confirmed.

The first is the importance of vulnerability in international public policy-making. This is the central theme of I&P, which started its activities in the Sahel region at the turn of the century, and which focuses primarily on poor and fragile countries.

Too many public and private investors claim to contribute to development but in fact focus only on the largest and most successful developing countries. We have therefore analyzed the geographical and sectoral orientations of public development institutions dedicated to the private sector, as part of research conducted with FERDI's Impact Chair and feeding into the summit.

They show the undeniable abandonment of the poorest countries by public and private investors. Reversing this trend is at the heart of I&P's advocacy of impact investing. Blending private and public resources is the key to achieving this. This message has been heard, even if much remains to be done to make it effective.

The second is the necessary convergence between development and the global public goods, including notably the climate.

For I&P, strengthening the productive sector of the poorest countries by supporting entrepreneurs is not only the most fundamental condition for building the resilience, but also the only path to truly sustainable development: poverty is not the answer to the climate challenge. Without poverty reduction, there will be no political and social acceptance of the environmental agenda.

This is why I&P puts at the heart of its approach the constant improvement of their environmental performance. This is also why we have chosen to support the Gaia investment fund, entirely dedicated to promote clean energies in Africa, through its governance and its ESG practices and impact.This new investment vehicle is financed by the Demaegt family, Schneider Electric and French family offices.

We are also currently finalizing a new pre-investment instrument in partnership with GIZ, designed to "green" the African entrepreneurial universe. We hope to demonstrate through this spectrum of initiatives that growth and environmental performance are compatible, and are the right response to the challenges of poverty and environmental degradation. More international resources, public and private, are needed here too to achieve this: this message has also been sent, and heard - and here too we hope that practice will follow.

This summit appears therefore as an encouragement to continue the fight to modify the international financial architecture, which still turns its back too often on the imperative dual need to fight poverty and protect the environment.

To find out more

→ 3 essential paths for the development agenda of the next 30 years - Jean-Michel Severion

→ Millions for billions: Accelerating African entrepreneurial emergence for accelerated, sustainable and job-rich growth. A publication by Jean-Michel Severino, who argues for the need to accelerate public involvement in favor of entrepreneurial emergence in poor and fragile countries.

→ The contributions of Ferdi's International Architecture of Financing for Development (IAFF) Chair to the Paris Summit: Ferdi's aim with the IAFF Chair was to contribute to the debate on reforming the global financial system for development by tackling the key issues and attempting to formulate concrete proposals.→ An IFC/World Bank Group experiment in mustering the private sector for development - Philippe Le Houérou & Hans Peter Lankes

→ Global Financial Pact: what role for public development banks in the face of crises? Article by Florian Léon, Senior Researcher, Fondation pour les Etudes et Recherches sur le Développement International (FERDI) and Jean-Baptiste Jacouton, Senior Researcher, Agence française de développement (AFD).