• • Members of the Climate Change Bureau of the Guatemalan Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources exchanged knowledge with members of Argentina’s and Paraguay’s Sustainable Finance Working Committees.   

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  May 24, 2022- In the framework of the Readiness Project – ALIDE, representatives of the Designated National Authority (DNA) of Guatemala, the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, met with members of the Sustainable Finance Working Committees of Argentina and Paraguay to find out more about their initiatives and to learn from their experiences.

  During the first meeting, Candelaria Alvarez, representative of the Secretariat of International Economic and Financial Relations of Argentina’s Ministry of Economy shared information about how her country’s Technical Working Committee on Sustainable Finance emerged in 2020 as a project born in the public sector in response to the need to link up climate, social and governance issues with the financial sector.

  She went on to explain that the Argentinean Technical Working Committee on Sustainable Finance  brings together financial sector regulators and seeks to formulate a National Sustainable Finance Strategy.  In order to do so, the constituent institutions worked on standardizing criteria and creating a roadmap as a guide for the project.

  “Each economy has its own dynamic and, as a result, each economy has to design its own instruments to serve its market,” Alvarez pointed out, noting that it is important to seek and work on the design of sustainable finance tools that are innovative and adjustable to the market in which they will be applied.

  During the second meeting, representatives of Guatemala’s Ministry of the Environment  and the country’s national consultant,  Antonethe Castañeda, talked with members of the Working Committee on Sustainable Finance of Paraguay, among them its General Manager, Mirta Martínez, and its President, Omar Fernández.

  Martínez shared information about the actions taken by her institution and the challenges it has been faced with since 2012.   Paraguay’s Sustainable Finance Working Committee  emerged as a private sector initiative to become a prototype sustainable development institution and implement innovative strategies in financial sector management.

  “The working committee has taken huge steps over the past five years and has experienced exponential growth.  We now encompass almost 100% of the institutions operating in Paraguay’s financial system,” stated Fernández. He went on to add that 70% of the financial institutions have joined  Paraguay’s Sustainable Finance Working Committee.

  The institution ultimately took the form of a self-sustaining initiative that contributed the first environmental and social guides to good practices in the financing of Paraguay’s three most important economic sectors: agriculture, stock breeding and agribusiness.

About ALIDE

ALIDE is the community of financial institutions that generates banking solutions for the development of Latin America and the Caribbean. Founded in 1968, its main objective is to contribute to the economic and social development of the region, through the good practices in development financing that it promotes among its associates, about 90 institutions with a presence in more than 20 Latin American countries and other regions of the world.

Contact

Katherine Rodríguez
Communications Unit of ALIDE
Phone: +511-203-5520 |: Ext: 227
comunicaciones@alide.org, comunicaciones2@alide.org
www.alide.org