Webinar: Decoding the Fundamentals of Development Finance

Background

The development community working on food systems is increasingly focusing on financing. The 2024 edition of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) Report will be entirely dedicated to financing for food security and nutrition. Likewise, next year’s IFAD’s Rural Development Report will be devoted to financing rural transformation.

The GDPRD will also contribute to this important international agenda with its 2024 Annual General Assembly (AGA) in November, focusing on financing the future of rural development and food systems in turbulent times.

This series of webinars is designed to help the development community gain a better understanding of development finance and donor approaches, to facilitate their participation in the global dialogue.

Register now and submit questions or specific topics of interest you would like to see covered during the webinar series. Feel free to share this event with colleagues and wider networks.

Speaker bios:

Marco V. Sánchez is the Deputy-Director of the Agrifood Economics and Policy Division at FAO, where he co-directs flagship reports such as The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World and The State of Food and Agriculture and oversees the Monitoring and Analyzing Food and Agriculture Policies Programme (MAFAP).

Previously, he was Senior Economist at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2006 –2017) and Economist at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (2004-2006). He has been consultant to UNDP, IFPRI and IADB (2000-2004) and supported lecturing and research at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University in the Netherlands (2000-2004), National University of Costa Rica (1995-1999), and Tilburg University in The Netherlands (1995-1996).

He has published extensively and was lead editor of books for Bloomsbury (Financing Human Development in Africa, Asia and the Middle East) and Palgrave/Macmillan (Public Policies for Human Development). His most recent articles feature in World Development, Journal of Environment and Development, Food Policy, Journal of Applied Economics and Journal of Policy Modelling.

Natalia Toschi is Head of Funding of the Treasury Services Division at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). After IFAD’s credit ratings in 2020, she set up the funding function and IFAD’s EMTN programme under which IFAD started issuing ESG private placements. Prior to joining IFAD, Natalia has worked in Banca IMI (now Intesa San Paolo) in ALM, risk management, and on the derivatives trading desk.

She also serves as the Finance and Budget Network coordinator of the UN CEB Secretariat in Geneva. Before that, she worked in the EuroMTS bond trading platform in the Market Monitoring team. In IFAD, she covered several roles in finance, including Investment manager and Head of the Financial Planning Unit. She also worked in the Programme Management Department as a Senior Policy officer.

Mita Samani is a Senior Consultant in Development and Climate Finance. She started her career as a financial analyst at Citi and joined DFID in 2006 as an Economic Adviser after completing an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics. She has a focus on investment and finance and has worked across a range of issues including climate change, energy, water and sanitation, and reform of International Financial Institutions. She has worked on MDB reform agendas, particularly the World Bank, AsDB and AfDB, and represented the UK on the Board of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development for three years. She then came back to lead DFID’s investment and business engagement work, including reform and expansion of DFID’s Development Finance Institution, British International Investment (formerly CDC) when she managed the UK’s shareholding of BII, PIDG and FSDA.

In 2017 she set up DFID’s Public Finance and Tax Department where she built a team to design and implement a cross-government approach to scale up tax and development to support developing countries raise revenue sustainably.  In 2019 she became head of the Private Sector Department, leading a team of over 70 people and deploying an annual budget of c. £700m-1bn across a range of policy and programmatic agendas including impact investment, disaster risk and pandemic insurance, financial sector deepening and capital markets development, infrastructure and climate finance and mobilization of private finance. Mita is currently working with partners such as PIDG, Helios Investment Partners, and Acorn Holdings Africa as a freelance consultant to design investment platforms to mobilize private capital into Africa and Asia.