Awareness Raising Sessions: Finance and Sustainable Development

One of the first steps toward integrating the financial sector into the debate on sustainability and its practice is to provide information on the state of the art of the global financial sector’s current experiences in incorporating environmental criteria. Likewise, to clearly define the sector’s needs for its entry into a culture of sustainability, identifying the sector’s concerns and perceived challenges becomes important.

The sessions’ objective is to introduce Latin American financial sector representatives to the relationship between the financial sector and the environment, presenting them with information so they can:

• Stay abreast of the best practices in relation to analysis criteria and implementation tools for environmental management used by major international banks.


• Get to know the experiences of investing in sustainable enterprise and creating green investment funds.


• Analyze the opportunities and risks that implementing sustainability practices implies.


• Suggest steps to follow for putting concrete environmental measures into practice in functional areas.

Therefore, the Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF) with the technical support of the Instituto Centroamericano de Administración de Empresas (INCAE), through its Centro Latinoamericano para la Competitividad y el Desarrollo Sostenible (CLACDS) and the Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano (FFLA) developed an initiative in the form of awareness-raising sessions in four Andean countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela.

Likewise, the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft – CDG (currently InWent) and the INCAE's Centro Latinoamericano para la Competitividad y el Desarrollo Sostenible – CLACDS, partners in the Ecobanking Project, invited financial institutions from El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to participate in the awareness-raising sessions, which were held in September 2002.

For logistical organization and the invitation to the sessions, there was also a local partner in each of the countries: Global Consultores en Desarrollo Sostenible (Global CDS) in Bolivia; Consejo Empresarial Colombiano para el Desarrollo Sostenible (CECODES) in Colombia; Banco Multisectorial de Inversiones (BMI) in El Salvador; Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano (FFLA), the Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF) and the Asociación de Bancos de Ecuador in Ecuador; the Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica (BCIE) in Guatemala and Honduras; INPYME in Nicaragua; support from the Asociación Latinoamericana de Instituciones Financieras (ALIDE) in Peru and from the Asociación Bancaria de Venezuela in Venezuela.

In particular, the reasoning behind the sessions is as follows:

• The participating financial institutions should become aware of the opportunity of having environmental guidelines in their internal and external operations – for reducing operating costs and risks – and the defects keeping them from being applied. Thus, a change in behavior would be encouraged for them to develop a more positive strategy to obtain a competitive advantage in globalized financial markets.


• Their countries’ development would be stimulated by the financial sector, reducing their projects’ environmental risks, thanks to promoting, exchanging, and identifying best practices and effective environmental tools. This would contribute to improving and implementing environmentally responsible standards in the financial sector.


• The financial institutions should aim at new products, sectors, lines of credit, and programs to orient themselves toward market trends and their customers’ environmental needs.

Target Group:Members of the boards of directors, executive presidents, general managers, general proxies, vice-presidents, departmental directors or managers, and area and section chiefs of Latin American financial institutions.