Access to Finance
IFC helps to increase the availability and affordability of financial services for individuals and micro, small, and medium enterprises. Our priorities are to help our clients provide broad-based financial services to individuals (such as credit, savings, payments, and insurance products) and to promote growth and employment generation by supporting sustainable lending to SMEs. We also help build the necessary financial infrastructure, such as credit bureaus and collateral registries. At the end of FY11, we had an active portfolio of 244 access-to-finance projects in 67 countries, valued at almost $294 million. Our FY11 project expenditures totaled $63.3 million. In all, 67 percent of project expenditures attributable to clients in individual countries went to IDA countries and 10 percent to fragile and conflict-affected countries.
