International Conference on Blended Development Finance and the New Industrial Policy, November 8-9, 2018: how public and private institutions might work better together and propose concrete solutions to accelerate effective development financing.
The International Conference on Blended Development Finance and the New Industrial Policy is expected to launch needed research, generate productive debate, and foster long-term collaboration across the political and professional spectra.
There are a lot of issues to be tackled to get the private/public financing synergy to succeed. Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals will require leveraging traditional official development assistance flows with private financial flows. 
The move to blended finance will require research on the design of financial instruments and financing mechanisms that maximize the development leverage of foreign and domestic public funds. It will need to be accompanied by mechanisms that can assess whether public blended funds are in fact scaling up, not substituting for, private investment, and will also need measurement methods to assess the development impact of the investments, both prospectively and retrospectively.
By mixing academic sessions with a series of high-level policy panels, the Conference will bring together practitioners who work in private sector development and academics who are involved in setting up the institutions and procedures that will govern blended finance.
The two-day conference will take place at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, on November 8-9, 2018 (see programme). The main organisers are the Graduate Institute’s Centre for Finance and Development (Geneva-based research centre), the Center for Global Development (Washington-based independent think-tank), and CDC Group (UK’s Development Finance Institution).
Text provided by the Graduate Institute’s Centre for Finance and Development.