to drive economic growth, support stability, and improve livelihoods. In this briefing to launch the programme, Overseas Private Investment Corporation Acting President and Chief Executive Officer David Bohigian give insight into the initiative. Excerpts:This agency is going to advance U.S. investment in emerging economies around the world, with a continued strong focus in Africa.
Today, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation has over $5 billion invested in Africa, which catalyses billions of dollars more, and that kind of investment really promotes stability, prosperity, connectivity, and trade. And why we’re here today to talk about the launch in less than two months of the Development Finance Corporation. It really is one of the biggest changes in U.S.
We think this model for development finance really is the future of finance, and we’ve got a long history of investing in Africa that we intend to build on. I visited Africa several times, Worku visited Africa more times than I can count, and we’ve seen everything from a Cameroonian eye hospital that’s helping cure people of cataracts and blindness, then we go to Togo where OPIC helped triple the amount of power in Togo.
As you know, the United States doesn’t operate in a vacuum; it doesn’t operate in Africa in a vacuum, and in fact, the largest investor, in the broad sense of the word, on this continent now appears to be China, through its Belt and Road Initiative and the Shanghai Coordination Council efforts. I am sure that your programmes and your new format had China in their sights in some way, and I’d like you to discuss that.
Right, well, clearly, respecting the environment is a key pillar of how the U.S. invests, and OPIC as well as the Development Finance Corporation take that into account through our environmental policies. We’ve been investing across full-spectrum energy through Power Africa throughout the continent for years now, and have an enviable environmental record.
We’re also doing deals that are affordable housing, that are in education, that are value-added manufacturing, and in affordable vehicles. You can find all of our Kenya projects if you go to the website for OPIC or to the app store, where we have OPIC projects—is that the app?—OPIC Portfolio, and you can click into Kenya or any other country in the world to find details on every project. Again, going to the transparency point, where every country, every citizen can find out where the U.S.
I’m proud of the fact that last year we launched a venture capital initiative to be able to work with earlier stage businesses, so that’s been an expanded mandate for our private equity business, to help more growth businesses. But as we move to Development Finance Corporation, the ability to invest equity in private equity funds we think could significantly increase our ability to work with fund managers.
So the Development Finance Corporation, in October of this year, will help build on the Overseas Private Investment Corporation’s almost 50-year track record. What will be different about the Development Finance Corporation is first, we’re going to have a $60 billion mandate, which, importantly, will help draw in private sector capital that should account for hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in Africa.