Rethinking Development Finance: Impact, Leverage, and the Private Capital Push

This episode of CID Voices explores how development finance institutions have evolved from counter-cyclical lenders during the financial crisis into impact-driven investors operating under mounting fiscal scrutiny. The conversation moves through the tensions shaping DFIs today: the push toward private capital mobilization and what it means for additionality, the segregation of capital pools across risk and return profiles, the challenges of local currency financing in emerging markets, and the growing pressure from governments to instrumentalize DFIs as part of national strategies. It closes on the geopolitical turn in development finance, including the DFC's reframing around national security, and what a future that blends development, climate, and defence finance might look like.

You can listen to Rethinking Development Finance: Impact, Leverage, and the Private Capital Push online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Rethinking Development Finance: Impact, Leverage, and the Private Capital Push is an episode from Harvard CID by Harvard Center for International Development.

This episode is 00:30:28 long.

This episode was published on Apr 16, 2026.

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