SUSTAINABLE FINANCE
About four or five years ago, we piloted the Neighbourhood Programme, where we decided that, rather than stretching ourselves thin, we will bring the full force of all the solutions of the bank and start deploying them at community levels.
And eventually we ended up calling it place-based economic development. But the idea is to identify the local needs of the communities and bring the solutions – financial capital, social capital, political capital – with the mindset of creating economic growth for those communities.
So it is more of a deployment mechanism to solve the local needs and the challenges and provide solutions which are specific to the needs of the communities.
The five pillars of our place-based solution toolkit are: affordable housing solutions; small business lending; energy and infrastructure solutions; workforce development solutions and access to finance.
These are the five big tools in our toolkits that we bring from the bank to solve the needs of different communities.
sustainabilitymag. com 127