In August 2024, in a strategic move to enhance economic growth and stability in the Dominican Republic, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), in collaboration with USAID, has announced a $42 million portfolio guaranty for Banreservas, the largest bank in the country. This initiative aims to increase small business lending, particularly targeting women-owned MSMEs and green loans.
Portfolio Guaranty: Targeting Critical Needs
The guaranty is designed to address urgent lending needs in the Dominican Republic, focusing on women micro-entrepreneurs in the Southwest corridor and environmentally sustainable projects. By covering up to 70% of Banreservas\’ losses for these high-risk loans, DFC aims to reduce the perceived risk and encourage more robust lending practices.
\”The partnership with Banreservas signifies our commitment to fostering inclusive economic growth and addressing financial disparities,\” said DFC CEO Scott Nathan. \”This guaranty will empower small businesses and support sustainable development in the Dominican Republic.\”
Portfolio Guaranty: Empowering Women and Promoting Sustainability
With nearly a quarter of the Dominican population living below the poverty line, and women owning fewer than 5% of MSMEs, this initiative is crucial. The guaranty is expected to support loans to approximately 3,500 MSMEs, with an average loan size of under $5,000, significantly impacting women entrepreneurs and promoting green initiatives.
Banreservas\’ President, Samuel Pereyra, emphasized the importance of this support: \”The DFC guaranty enhances our ability to extend credit to underserved sectors, particularly women-owned businesses and environmentally sustainable projects.\”
Portfolio Guaranty: Advancing Regional Integration and Economic Prosperity
The portfolio guaranty aligns with the goals of the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP), announced by President Biden in 2022, to tackle economic inequality and foster regional economic integration. This initiative, part of several measures unveiled during the inaugural APEP Leaders’ Summit, highlights the collaborative efforts between DFC, USAID, and regional stakeholders to mobilize quality investments and boost regional competitiveness.
Portfolio Guaranty: Long-term Impact and Global Partnerships
The guaranty is expected to catalyze significant economic growth by enabling Banreservas to expand its microfinance portfolio and support MSMEs, driving innovation, job creation, and sustainable practices. Additionally, the initiative underscores the importance of international cooperation in addressing local economic challenges.
This partnership sets a precedent for future collaborations between international financial institutions and local banks, demonstrating the potential of leveraging global partnerships to achieve sustainable economic development.
Conclusion
The $42 million portfolio guaranty by DFC for Banreservas marks a significant step towards economic resilience and inclusive growth in the Dominican Republic. By empowering small businesses and promoting sustainable development, this initiative not only addresses immediate financial challenges but also paves the way for long-term economic stability and prosperity.
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For more information, visit DFC\’s investment story.
DFC Announces $42 Million Guaranty to the Dominican Republic’s Banreservas, Plans to Open New Regional Office in Santo Domingo in October
Afghanistan’s Mineral Future: From Buried Wealth to National Architecture
For much of the modern era, Afghanistan has been interpreted through the language of conflict, fragility, and geopolitics. Yet beneath that familiar narrative lies a different national reality: one of the most underdeveloped mineral endowments in the world.
Its mountains and terrain are believed to hold significant deposits of copper, iron ore, lithium, rare earth elements, gold, and other strategic minerals. At a time when electrification, battery storage, and industrial supply-chain security are becoming central to the global economy, these resources are no longer peripheral. They sit close to the heart of the next industrial era.
But Afghanistan’s mineral story is not fundamentally about geology.
It is about whether a nation can build the institutional, financial, and infrastructural architecture required to transform buried wealth into enduring prosperity.
Natural resources on their own do not create development. In many countries, they have produced volatility, elite capture, fiscal distortion, and missed national potential. Where resource wealth has been translated into long-term strength, success has rarely come from extraction alone. It has come from design.
Three foundations matter.
The first is a transparent and credible licensing regime. Without it, capital remains short-term, speculative, or politically distorted. With it, a country can begin to attract serious long-horizon partners while protecting national interest and public legitimacy.
The second is sovereign revenue architecture. Resource wealth must be governed through institutions capable of channeling proceeds into infrastructure, education, productive systems, and long-term national reserves rather than immediate fiscal depletion. A country that extracts without stewarding simply liquidates its future.
The third is physical economic infrastructure. Mineral deposits become economically meaningful only when they are connected to power, transport, logistics, processing capacity, and regional trade routes. Without these systems, resource wealth remains stranded beneath the ground, technically valuable but nationally unrealized.
Afghanistan’s challenge has not been the absence of assets. It has been the absence of the systems required to convert those assets into broad-based development.
Yet this is precisely why the opportunity remains so large.
Because the sector is still underdeveloped, Afghanistan is not locked into a mature but failing model. It still has the possibility of first-principles design. A serious mineral strategy could serve as the anchor of a wider national blueprint, linking extraction to infrastructure investment, domestic industrial formation, and regional transport corridors connecting Central and South Asia.
This is where the question becomes larger than mining.
The deeper issue is whether Afghanistan can create a credible economic architecture above the mineral base: institutions that inspire trust, capital structures that support long-term development, and national systems that ensure resource wealth strengthens the country rather than fragments it.
Afghanistan’s mineral endowment should not be understood merely as a buried stock of commodities. It should be understood as a strategic national platform, one that could help finance infrastructure, expand industrial capacity, deepen regional integration, and reshape the economic horizon of the country.
The future of Afghanistan may depend less on the minerals beneath its soil than on the quality of the institutions, structures, and ambitions built above it.
