Inclusive Finance for the Blue Economy

Fiw Topics

Digital Financial Services
Inclusive Digital Economies

Fiw Year

2024

Transcripts:

English

Spanish

French

Summary + Key Insights

The panel discussed the critical role of inclusive finance in supporting small-scale fishers within the blue economy, highlighting challenges and innovative solutions.

🌊 Importance of Financial Inclusion: Access to finance is crucial for small-scale fishers to ensure sustainable practices and prevent overfishing. Without formal financial services, fishers often rely on informal and exploitative lending, exacerbating poverty.

🍽️ Food Security and Nutrition: The blue economy is a critical source of nutrition for low-income populations. Enhancing support for small-scale fisheries can help address global food security challenges.

💡 Biodiversity Protection: Oceans account for over 70% of global biodiversity. Protecting these ecosystems is essential for climate resilience and sustainability, necessitating innovative conservation financing.

👩‍👧‍👦 Empowering Women in Fisheries: Women play a significant role in the blue economy, often in informal or unpaid roles. Addressing this underreporting is crucial for effective financial inclusion strategies.

🤝 Collaborative Solutions: Multi-stakeholder partnerships are necessary to create supportive financial frameworks that enhance resilience and adaptive capacity in coastal communities.

💸 Innovative Financing Models: Impact bonds and parametric insurance are promising tools to provide financial security for fishers, allowing them to recover from climate shocks while promoting sustainable practices.

🔄 Creative Financial Instruments: Developing flexible and scalable financial products is essential to meet the unique needs of small-scale fishers and drive sustainable economic growth in coastal communities.

This session summary was AI-generated using NoteGPT.

This session aims to draw attention to the blue economy and the 500 million people who rely on it for their livelihoods and sustenance. It will examine the role inclusive finance stakeholders can play in the blue economy, and why this agenda seems to have been largely neglected so far. It will discuss why small-scale fishers matter, the challenges and opportunities to serve them and innovative finance approaches adopted by organizations such as Rare, Levoca, and WTW. It will draw on examples from business models and blue economy initiatives worldwide and try to establish that small-scale fishers can be an investible segment. The session will end with a call for action about what needs to be done to make the blue economy an integral part of the inclusive finance agenda.

Session Speakers

Anindita Chakraborty

Senior Manager, CFI

Anindita is an inclusive finance specialist with eleven years of experience undertaking research, ratings, client protection certifications, program implementation, training, and evaluation across multiple countries in Asia and Africa. She works closely with CFI’s leadership team on fundraising, operationalizing CFI’s strategy, internal knowledge management, and organizational processes. Anindita has also been leading CFI’s research partnership with Rare and the Global EbA Fund in the Philippines.

Carlos Arango

Director, Financial Resilience, Rare

Over 18+ years of professional experience including supply chain management in a large manufacturing company in Latin America, small business financing and development in an economic development center in Washington DC, and consultant for social impact projects – women led cooperatives – in Mexico and Peru. Currently working for Rare on financial inclusion and small business development in community led small scale fisheries in Philippines, Indonesia, Mozambique, Brazil, and Honduras. Financial inclusion is a resilient strategy for climate change adaptation in vulnerable small fishing communities.

Catarina Caricati

Catarina is an impact finance specialist at Levoca, with design and management of investment strategies that drive meaningful change in global economic and sustainable development. She worked on developing the first Small Fisheries Impact Bond, an innovative approach to financing sustainable fisheries launched during the 2024 Climate Week. Catarina holds a Master’s in Sustainability from Columbia University and brings diverse experience from the private and impact sectors, including global strategy consulting and investments in climate and education.

Sarah Conway

Director Disaster Risk Finance & Parametrics, WTW

Sarah Conway is a Director in WTW’s Disaster Risk Finance team, where she leads the Ecosystem Resilience practice. She helps to design, deploy and scale pre-arranged, trigger-based financial instruments to enhance the resilience of natural capital assets (e.g., coral reefs, mangroves) and the livelihoods dependent on their services (e.g., fishers). She also focuses on designing solutions that seek to build financial resilience to the impacts of climate change (e.g., a resilience wrapper around debt issuances to protect debt servicing obligations from key climate-related risks). After spending her early career in traditional finance, she has spent >15 years in the conservation and climate finance space for the public and private sectors. This included several years with an Indonesian-based environmental consulting firm supporting projects across Southeast Asia and the Pacific and serving as the Lead Climate Finance Negotiator for the U.S. delegation to the UNFCCC through COP21 in Paris. Sarah holds a Master’s in Environmental Economics & Climate Change from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Bachelor’s in Economics from Claremont McKenna College.

FIW Resources

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