The Inter-American Development Bank is seeking to increase savings among Latin immigrants in the United States by fostering greater competition in the money-transmission industry and providing them with information on lowcost remittance services to help reduce transaction costs and allow migrants to send more money home.
The bank is also hoping to provide assistance to financial institutions to develop financial products that offer migrants more control over remittance uses to increase savings. These announcements are contained in the new edition of the IDB’s 2010 Development Effectiveness Overview.
The overview said the bank has made strides to boost transparency, accountability and enhance the development impact of its investments in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, the report cautions that relevant knowledge gaps still remain on certain development interventions, in areas such as gender policy, regional public goods and fiscal reforms, and calls for the bank to invest on specific methodologies and impact analyses to measure the direct social and economic benefits that these projects have generated in the region.
Unique opportunity
The report summarises the actions taken by the bank in 2010 to measure and improve the social, economic and environmental impact of the IDB’s work throughout the region. It reports on the development impact of several ongoing regional IDB projects, in areas such as agriculture, education and on the bank’s work in Haiti, offering a unique opportunity to share important lessons learnt with policymakers and the public in general.
“Since the adoption of the bank’s Development Effectiveness Framework in 2008, we are committed to make a sustained effort to show that every development project we finance has the impact we expect it to have, and that all the transactions associated to the implementation of the project are held to the highest standards of transparency and accountability”, said IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno.
“Our shareholders as well as the people of Latin America and the Caribbean would expect no less. We have made clear advances but this is still the beginning of a process. We are proud to share what we are learning and we hope the conclusions of this report will help the bank and policymakers in the region identify the projects and policies that work best to help accelerate the economic and social development of the region.”
The report looks into the way the bank designs projects, how it evaluates the impact and how aligned the bank’s investments are with the most urgent development needs of borrowing member countries. It shows that the percentage of sovereign guaranteed operations that at entry have information to measure and provide evidence on their results increased to 96 per cent in 2010 from 75 per cent in 2009.
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