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This morning the Caribbean Development bank through the Development Finance Corporation launched its ninth consolidated line of credit, a loan of 40 million dollars to be divided among 4 sectors.

The line of credit will be extended to the productive sector, MSME's and firms with annual gross sales of 30 million. residential mortgages, student loans, and renewable energy. The Vice President for the CDB and the CEO for DFC spoke more about the significance of this event.

Issac Solomon, Vice President, Operations, CDB
"So as we indicated earlier the ninth consolidated line of credit is the third of some interventions we had with DFC over the past few years, this one in particular addresses education, in particular student loans the MSME sector, renewable energy as well and I think those are the main areas of intervention on this line of credit."

"The DFC is an institution that is state owned by the people, the government and people of Belize and of course Belize is a founding member of the Caribbean development bank, and the Caribbean development bank was 55 years old this year and so Belize was there from the start and so the DFC is just one channel of intervention that use to help transform lives and reduce poverty here in Belize."

Henry Anderson, CEO,DFC
"So this is a significant milestone for CDB and for DFC, as was said in the presentations this is the third line of credit that DFC is getting in the past two years. How do we decide what we need? Well we have a pipeline we have people and businesses coming to us and seeing the kind of opportunities they need and so we sit with CDB and then we construct a consolidated line. The reason we call it consolidated is because of the different parts that it has in this case, a portion of the 40 million goes to private sector, a form of MSME's which means firms up to 30 million is sales and 9 million goes to mortgage lending, homes, financing homes and 9 million goes to student loans for tertiary education and 4 million goes to renewable energy and energy efficiency so we have those. Basically we intend to implement this loan in about 2 years in terms of disbursement or maybe a little bit over that but the economy is performing and when the economy is performing the demand is there what is interesting in how DFC is working right now again as was mentioned is we have an environmental and social management system so except for the education loans every single loan we give we look at the climate factors, we look at the social factors to ensure that our lending is resilient and socially on point. What that does is it strengthens the balance sheet of Belize as a country if you will and it ensures not only that DFC portfolio is stronger but that for clients that they are looking for what's coming ahead and having resilient investments and better able to manage risks in terms of climate change and ensuring the social impact."

Prime Minister John Briceno who also attended the launch reflected on how a former PUP administration almost led the DFC to bankruptcy:

John Briceno, Prime Minister
"Well actually to me this morning is more of a celebration of where DFC is from where it was. As I said earlier during the Musa administration which I was a a part of, we tried to push a rapid growth with the DFC, and in many instances the risks we were taking were not well measured. And the DFC then got into serious problems almost on the verge of bankruptcy. We were grateful to the CDB because the CDB never gave up on the DFC they continued collaborating and they continued working with them and its under the previous government that they did some sort of refinancing but the management of the DFC during that time has been extremely conservative it was so conservative that they were losing money every year and you can't have an institution that is losing every year. When we got into government in 2020 the loan portfolio had a default rate for about 26% and that was way too much and so we did a number of innovative steps that were taken, one is to change the dynamic the management to have a more dynamic management to be able to look at the different sectors that where the opportunities for the DFC when it comes to the development from tourism to women and investment in women and MSME's and so by doing that we have managed to refocus the DFC, the government made a large capital injection I think it is over 30 million dollars and then that allowed them to have a stronger capital base for them to be able to borrow more monies to be able to invest and so today it is a celebration."