Access to Finance & Economic Opportunities Project – Mais Oportunidades

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The project seeks to address structural challenges, exogenous shocks and market failures that prevent MSMEs and individuals from accessing and using financial services and taking advantage of economic opportunities. It supports a comprehensive approach to promoting livelihoods, jobs, climate resilience, and economic transformation by increasing access to finance while improving the business environment, developing firm capabilities, and providing last mile infrastructure in areas of economic opportunity. The project will provide guarantees and lines of credit to support access to finance, support savings initiatives to build economic and climatic resilience and expand opportunities in specific sectors and targeted value chains. It will leverage other Bank operations and IFC investments.Components 1 and 2 are complementary and mutually reinforcing, together contributing to improving access to finance, spurring MSME growth, and creating jobs (see Figure 1). Component 1 will promote access and usage of financial services for MSMEs and low-income households using guarantees, a line of credit line, credit infrastructure investments, and matched savings grants. Component 2 will deepen existing markets through ecosystem-, market-, and firm-level interventions. Against a backdrop of cross-cutting support through business environment reforms and investments in last-mile infrastructure, targeted firm-level interventions will aim to upgrade managerial capabilities to improve firm productivity, support technology adoption to increase competitiveness and resilience. It will link a subset of qualified SMEs with opportunities to access finance and grow through a catalytic fund. These activities are expected to create a pipeline of SMEs that would be eligible for financing from other sources, including Component 1. A combined private and financial sector development approach addresses multiple constraints. Firm-level interventions under Component 2 ensure a steady increase in demand for financial services made accessible by Component 1 activities, which MSMEs can then make the most use of thanks to the economic opportunities generated by ecosystem- and market-level interventions under Component 2. Building on lessons from past operations, this project proposes to support both skills and financial access jointly.