Foreign Affairs committee  I think it's really helpful to start with lowish expectations. That just gives the team you hire a good platform to exceed expectations. Remember also that if you're making a choice between making an investment or making a grant, with a grant, that money is 100% gone, but if you

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, of course. We can show you what our portfolio looked like in 2011, when I joined, in terms of where the capital has gone, and how it looks today. It is a dramatic change.

Foreign Affairs committee  No, I'm very happy to start. Yes, you describe what we call the perpetual paranoia of running a DFI. I would say our stakeholders think about impact, impact, and impact. They don't, at the front of their minds, think about the risk that they assume in order to deliver that impac

Foreign Affairs committee  I think it is doable. It's easier, obviously, when you have a smaller investment amount. We're investing about $1 billion or $1.5 billion every year within a relatively small geography. If every company we invest in had to meet certain standards, that would be very hard. For you

Foreign Affairs committee  Sure, would you like me to kick off?

Foreign Affairs committee  The picture you paint is a reasonably accurate one, and this is good news; this is what we all want to achieve, the private sector in time crowding out the DFIs. That's nirvana for all of us. However, there is no question that there is still a big gap where DFIs are needed. It's

Foreign Affairs committee  It's two things. It's the governance structure, but it's also investment in relationships. Let me take the second first. No governance structure will protect you if you don't get out there and explain what you're doing and why you're doing it to all the people who matter. A gre

Foreign Affairs committee  There was a difference when it changed from a system where every investment we made and every receipt we received were counted to a system of, when we're given capital, just that figure counts. Because the U.K. has a target of 0.7% each year, you can imagine how hard it was for u

Foreign Affairs committee  We have a minimum hurdle and that's tied to our long-term remuneration scheme, so we don't want to flirt with it too much. If people don't get paid, they won't stay. The minimum that we want to deliver over a 10-year horizon is 3.5%, but we definitely want to be above that, so p

Foreign Affairs committee  I think there are two questions you've asked there. One is whether the U.K. being a leader in aid helps in funding us, and the other is whether it helps us in attracting the right people. Of course the two questions are linked. The fact that the U.K. does have a large ODA budget

Foreign Affairs committee  We use tax havens only when we invest indirectly through funds as a pooling mechanism, because investors come from different places and need a tax-neutral place to pool their capital. We invest, directly or indirectly, with a very strong code of responsible investing, as we call

Foreign Affairs committee  I think it was actually a comment I made earlier. My feeling is that the owners and the stakeholders of a DFI should be thinking about it as a high-quality investment organization. This is a problem of language, because if you have an aid agency essentially as the owner, they tal

Foreign Affairs committee  If I may, I would add a couple of things on the hardest countries. In a way that's almost been CDC's specialist subject over the last six years. Actually, we now have a portfolio that has significantly more weighting to the hardest countries than any other DFI does. We've done th

Foreign Affairs committee  For an investing organization, it's always made up of what I always call the holy trinity of deals—that's addressable market, whatever strategy you choose—people, and money to support it. They have to be consistent. You have a choice. The more money you want to give it, the more

Foreign Affairs committee  I'll try to make it short because it's a long story. CDC started in 1948, had a lot of impact and achieved a great reputation for being pioneering, particularly in Africa. If you go around Africa today, you see plantations, financial institutions, and cement factories that sim