This may be a long answer.
First of all, the Desjardins fund for inclusive finance is a new fund that emerged from an experiment that we've conducted over the past 10 years on an international development fund managed by Développement international Desjardins and a limited partnership to draw a clear distinction among the various uses of the funds.
The purpose of the Desjardins fund for inclusive finance is to make loans—to use capital—to microfinance institutions that deal with the poorest and most disadvantaged clienteles. It may do so in the form of loans or debentures with financial cooperatives to provide them with liquidity and especially to offset a medium-term shortage of resources at the financial institutions in developing countries. The local savings being used are a demand resource, and thus are lent for the very short term. And to enable the institutions to meet the regulatory ratios of the central banks of those countries—the institutions that need medium-term capital—we provide that.
The other important action is that we have invested in corporations. We therefore acquire capital and we become a member of the board of directors of a limited company, which is not a cooperative, together with other international investors. This fund serves as a lever to mobilize additional resources.
We are currently working in partnership with the African Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the FMO of the Netherlands and Bluewater Investment Group, which is an enormous microfinance investment group.
Our approach is always to promote local investment and local ownership. We bring in domestic community investors in the new businesses and, in partnership with the board of directors, provide extremely strict and rigorous governance rules, which makes it possible to form organizations.
Currently, DID strongly supports four financial institutions of this kind in Zambia, Tanzania, Panama and soon Uganda, because a project is starting up there.
All the development projects that we are conducting are scattered across 15 or 20 countries as well. We are taking part in bilateral projects in Haiti designed to support a national financial cooperative institution, the Le Levier federation. We are also taking part in a structural project at the national level with the Haitian government to develop agricultural financing mechanisms.
In Mali, and in fact in four West African countries, we are working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to introduce new technologies in the financial institutions engaged in microfinance to enable them to go further in the rural areas and to access even more disadvantaged clienteles. In Burkina Faso, we are working with the largest cooperative financial institution to develop financial centres for entrepreneurs. In Senegal, we are working with the Senegalese government to support the microfinance sector as a whole through structural actions to clean up the sector and provide technology to the smallest microfinance institutions, and so on. In fact, 40 active projects are currently underway.
Does that answer your question?