Description of the Project
Five countries are part of the Central American Region: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, and the CAMBio Project works in them. These countries have an area of around 420,000 km2, with a combined population of 33.2 millions of inhabitants.
The project activities have been designed to guarantee that Central American SMMEs contribute progressively to the sustainable development and environment protection, when incorporating the way of addressing problems related to the loss of biodiversity into their business practices. The Project will remove barriers in the bank, businesses, politics and legislation to create an empowering environment that may catalyze biodiversity friendly investments , in sectors like organic agriculture, sustainable forestry, agro-forestry, forest grazing system, sustainable tourism, certified aquaculture, and sustainable fishery.
The Project will use as a base the emerging global markets for eco-friendly products and the demand of certified products to transform SMMEs production practices, with the double benefit of trying to reach both sustainable development and biodiversity conservation. One important part of the Project is the certification of productive activities for products like coffee, cocoa, bananas, citric fruits, ferns, foliage, flowers, avocados, pineapples, timber and non-timber forest products, and sustainable tourism. Additionally, the Project works with networks of partners further to the direct executors (CABEI-UNDP-GEF), to identify new potential initiatives performed by associations of producers, cooperatives and owners of private reserves, in order to generate a good amount of potentially financeable investments that can be prioritized.
As public and credit policies affect the behavior of biodiversity friendly economic activities, consumers and businesses, they play an important role in influencing markets. The Project will work also with the Ministries of Environment, Industry, Commerce, Economy, Finances and others related, to enhance policies and to create incentive structures for the SMMEs, and at the same time to reform policies that make green markets be considered as marginal.
The executing agency is CABEI, which will contribute with more than US$17 Millions as credit, through its regional financial network, developing new financial products designed for biodiversity friendly SMMEs. GEF funds will be used to create two mechanisms to support credit funds (Partial Credit Guarantee Fund and Biodiversity Award Fund) and the technical support and business development for the regional SMMEs that complement the credits that CABEI will be providing.
