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U.S. International 

Development Finance 

Corporation

Strategic Plan

FY 2022-2026

. 

dfc.gov
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About DFC

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC or Corporation) is America’s 

development finance institution. DFC is the newest U.S. government agency, launched in December 2019 

with a mandate to partner with the private sector to finance solutions to the most critical challenges facing 

the developing world while advancing America’s foreign policy goals abroad. DFC’s transactions in 

developing markets directly further America’s interest in working towards a prosperous, more equal 

world. Partnering with the private sector in these efforts is critical to marshalling the resources needed to 

expand access to finance, reliable energy, digital connectivity, lifesaving healthcare, and other critical 

infrastructure and services.

In key markets across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and beyond, DFC strategically supports private sectorled growth and mobilizes additional sources of capital. DFC is a key component of the U.S. commitment 

to ensure developing countries pursuing transformational economic and infrastructure development have

a positive, democratic alternative for financing compared to state-directed investments by strategic 

competitors.

DFC mobilizes the private sector.

DFC finds gaps in capital markets and closes them. We directly enable compelling development projects 

by mobilizing private capital to drive real impact.

DFC is committed to maximizing — and measuring — global development.

DFC drives developmental impact that is measurable through a rigorous, best-in-class screening and 

diligence process. The agency then works with public and private sector partners to monitor and evaluate 

each project’s impact over its life, to inform and improve our evaluation processes.

DFC advances U.S. foreign policy goals and fosters global security.

DFC’s supported projects further U.S. strategic goals in each region and market we operate in. The 

Corporation works in collaboration with partner agencies across the U.S. government.
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DFC’s Strategic Goals

DFC is well-positioned to increase itsreach and impact over the next several years. To do that effectively, 

the Corporation is undertaking a strategic review of its priorities and processes to ensure it can 

successfully complete the transition from OPIC and USAID Development Credit Authority and Mission 

Transaction Unit to DFC and provide the organization with a solid foundation on which to grow. As DFC 

moves forward with refining its goals and operations, this “strategic plan” is sure to evolve and change 

too.

With that in mind, there are four key goals that will undoubtedly drive the next chapter of DFC’s growth:

1. Engage and mobilize the private sector

2. Drive development impact acrosssectors and regions

3. Improve impact management monitoring, measurement, and learning

4. Scale the Corporation sustainably
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Strategic Goal 1: Engage and Mobilize the Private Sector

Through DFC, the U.S. Government (USG) accelerates the flow of private capital to less developed 

countries by supporting private sector investments that cannot obtain viable financing from other sources. 

DFC’s targeted outcome for this strategic goal is to mobilize private capital in support of sustainable, 

broad-based economic growth, and poverty reduction that advances development and U.S. foreign policy 

interests.

1.1 DFC Tools

DFC offers loans, loan guarantees, equity investments, political risk insurance, technical assistance (TA), 

and feasibility studies to drive significant amounts of private capital into challenging developing markets 

to address local needs. DFC’s offerings mobilize government and private resources to support key sectors 

such as infrastructure, energy, water, and health.

DFC’s equity authority allows it to play a new and catalytic role in mobilizing private sector capital to 

achieve developmental and strategic outcomes. Equity investing in funds also makes DFC a more 

attractive partner to other development finance institutions and expands impact.

DFC’s new technical assistance (TA) program also mobilizes private capital by providing grant funding 

to develop projects and help make them bankable.

1.2 Expand and Diversify the Client Base

DFC intends to strategically expand its client base by executing new approaches to identify transactions 

and attract a wider net of local and regional clients while remaining committed to prioritizing transactions 

that involve U.S. investors and identifying opportunities for U.S. small and medium enterprises. In 

addition to prioritizing work with U.S. investors, DFC will seek out relationships with local companies in 

less developed countries, highly developmental partners with innovative product offerings and business 

models, and foreign companies that align with DFC’s development priorities. DFC is also targeting nontraditional partners from diverse backgrounds to ensure our ultimate beneficiaries include members of 

marginalized communities who need DFC support the most.

1.3 Collaborate with Partners

DFC is creating valuable partnerships with other U.S. federal agencies, development finance institutions, 

NGOs, think tanks, and the private sector to maximize development impact. DFC recognizes that 

nongovernment stakeholders play a critical advisory and partnership role. DFC and many foundations 

share a common mission but bring different resources and tools to the table. DFC will continue to 

leverage expertise and grant funding from foundations to expand its impact. DFC values the resources 

non-government stakeholders bring to the table including research, sector expertise, and regional 

presence.
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Strategic Goal 2: Drive Development Impact Across Sectors and Regions

DFC invests across a range of sectors, geographies, and themes to achieve its mission. There are several 

targeted outcomes of this strategic goal:

1. Increase development outcomesin each of the following development sectors.

2. Craft a well-balanced portfolio across regions that aligns with USG development and national 

security priorities.

3. Increase exposure to investments that help combat the effects of climate change, increase 

financial inclusion in developing markets, and increase equity and inclusion.

2.1 Sectors

DFC has identified and prioritized industry sectors where our innovative financing tools can drive 

development impact across geographies. Depending on the evolving priorities of the Administration, 

priority sectors may change.

Sectors:

Energy Health Digital Housing Infrastructure Food Security 

& Ag

Water, 

Sanitation, 

Hygiene

Cross-Cutting Initiatives:

Climate Financial 

Inclusion

Gender

DFC expects to be a leading participant in the President’s Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative that 

aims to improve infrastructure across the developing world. Investments across nearly all our sectors may 

play a role in this critical effort to drive infrastructure development and provide an alternative to the 

predatory financing practices of strategic competitors.
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2.2 Geographies

DFC will seek to grow its portfolio of catalytic investments across all the regions in which it operates: 

Africa, the Indo-Pacific region, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and Eurasia. 

It will drive broad-based values, private sector-led growth that expands economic opportunity and 

advances U.S. development and strategic objectives specific to each region. These development and 

strategic objectives will support regional priorities identified in conjunction with its interagency partners, 

including the Eurasian energy sector, small and medium enterprises in the West Bank and Gaza, and 

healthcare systems strengthening in Africa.

DFC’s authorizing legislation, the BUILD Act, mandates that DFC prioritize investment in low-income 

countries (LICs) and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs). Below are some of the ways DFC 

prioritizes LICs and LMICs across all regions:

• Give extra weight to all transactions in LICs and LMICs in our “IQ scoring,” which evaluates 

developmental impact of each project and is a key factor in determining whether to pursue 

support of a project.

• Coordinate closely with USAID missions to identify challenges accessing finance in developing 

countries and to source developmental projects. Since many USAID missions are in LICs and 

LMICs, most transactions sourced in collaboration with USAID are in LICs and LMICs.

• Leverage our overseas presence in Africa, the region with the largest portion of countries being 

LICs and LMICs, to drive business development and evaluation.

2.3 Cross-Cutting Initiatives

There are many lenses we apply to every potential investment, and we have prioritized four cross-cutting 

initiatives to advance broad-based development outcomes:

Climate

Building an impactful portfolio of climate-smart investments is key to furthering DFC’s commitment to 

development, and to providing a values-driven, sustainable investment alongside like-minded partners 

and allies. Over the past year, DFC has announced hundreds of millions in climate investments, all of it 

focused on supporting economic mobility, jobs, and tools to build prosperous clean energy economies in 

developing countries.

Gender Equity

DFC’s 2X Women’s Initiative is committed to addressing the unique challenges women face globally and 

unlocking the multi-trillion-dollar opportunity they represent. DFC applies a gender lens to every project 

it considers helping make sure that women will benefit. In doing so, DFC prioritizes those areas that are 

proven to have an outsized positive impact on women: climate change, water, infrastructure, technology, 

healthcare, food security, and small and medium-sized women-owned businesses.

Financial Inclusion

DFC provides market rate financing to clients who have determined that private sector financing is not 

available at sustainable terms or tenors. DFC often works with financial institutions, impact investment 

funds, and other local commercial lenders to reach these individuals. DFC will support financial 

investment including digital technologies and companies that provide digital solutions to reduce barriers 

to financial services for unbanked and underserved populations.
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Build Back Better World (B3W) Strategic Partnership with the Private Sector

President Biden and G7 partners agreed to launch the bold new global infrastructure initiative Build Back 

Better World (B3W), a values-driven, high-standard, and transparent infrastructure partnership led by 

major democracies to help narrow the $40+ trillion infrastructure need in the developing world, which has 

been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Through B3W, the G7 and other like-minded partners will 

coordinate in mobilizing private-sector capital in four areas of focus—climate, health and health security, 

digital technology, and gender equity and equality—with catalytic investments from respective 

development finance institutions.

DFC is well positioned as help advance B3W as part of a whole of USG approach. DFC’s investment 

pillars align with the goals of B3W and the Corporation already has a strong track record of partnering 

with the private sector in developing markets around the world. DFC is building on previous outreach 

programs such as town halls and roundtables with the private sector and key foreign government agencies 

to provide information on the financing tools we offer and what we aim to achieve through the B3W 

priorities that match with the host country needs.
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Strategic Goal 3: Impact Management Monitoring, Measurement, and Learning

DFC is building up its new Impact Management, Monitoring, and Learning (IMML) division to 

strengthen its ability to monitor, analyze, and manage the development impact of its portfolio on an 

ongoing basis, compare objectives and targets to actual results, suggest adjustments where needed, and 

identify learnings that help improve new and existing projects. This gives DFC enhanced capabilities to 

assess and improve its contribution to achieving positive development impacts and deliver on this 

strategic goal. Targeted outcomes include:

1. Ensuring that each transaction DFC approves and executes has measurable development 

outcomes and monitor the development results of DFC investments to inform future transactions;

2. Ensuring that DFC’s transactions are targeted to improving outcomes for marginalized groups 

including women through the 2X collaborative. 

3. Conducting assessments of whether and how the Corporation’s support contributes to its strategic 

impact targets and identify where adjustments in investment strategy are needed to enhance 

impact; and

4. Becoming a leader in generating impact through its rigorous approach to impact management that 

is aligned to globally accepted principles, disseminating impact management practices more 

broadly, and openly sharing its impact management methodologies.

DFC gathers data from clients to monitor and assess their development impact from self-monitoring tools 

and document review, such as the Impact Quotient and Development Outcome Surveys (008s). DFC also 

conducts site monitoring and third-party assessments and evaluations to assess performance and 

compliance with DFC conditions and to monitor their development impact. This data is disaggregated by 

impacted group (e.g. women, small business owner, etc.) to better understand DFC’s longitudinal impact 

on underserved communities. 

DFC’s performance assessment and evaluation activities involve deeper and holistic analyses of project 

impacts that help inform DFC decision-making, programming, and strategy, as well as build evidence to 

support DFC’s role in mobilizing private capital to solve some of today’s most pressing global 

development challenges. These activities provide a critical feedback loop that is a key component of a 

best-in-class impact management framework.

Future Plans

To achieve DFC’s goal of building evidence for impact and integrating impact data into decision-making 

throughout the investment cycle, thus allowing DFC to make decisions that enhance its development 

impact, DFC intends to:

• Develop a deeper impact performance management, monitoring, and learning strategy;

• Further develop the tools required to execute this strategy, including those that analyze impact 

data and create data visualizations to share impact results internally and externally;

• Implement activities in support of the strategy, including conducting several sectoral and/or 

thematic performance evaluations that will build evidence in priority areas for DFC;

• Enhance feedback loops to share learnings from monitoring and evaluation throughout DFC;

• Integrate impact data and considerations into DFC business decisions;

• Continue engaging in compliance activities with standards and principles, including verification 

of impact performance practices and participation in communities of practice with other 

investors, and

• Develop and pilot policies, procedures, and templatesto conduct performance assessment close- 
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outs for projects nearing maturity.
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Strategic Goal 4: Scale the Corporation Sustainably

The launch of DFC in 2019 brought together the tools of OPIC and USAID’s financing arm, the 

Development Credit Authority (DCA), and provided expanded and modernized tools to build on a long

U.S. tradition of mobilizing investment in developing countries. Additionally, DFC was launched with 

strong bipartisan support through the BUILD Act, which more than doubled OPIC’s investment capacity 

to $60 billion, and authorized new tools like equity authority to enable the new Corporation to expand 

impact in developing countries. The increase in tools, capacity, and complexity requires supporting 

people and processes to grow its ability to fulfill BUILD Act mandates, prudently manage its portfolio, 

and efficiently execute on new project activity.

There are several targeted outcomesfor thisstrategic goal which include:

1. Augment and strengthen existing capabilities and bolster new ones

2. Refine processes to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness

3. Enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout the Corporation 

DFC must continue to build important capabilities, which are needed to advance the Corporation’s 

prudent management of the project workload and the related functions that must be performed, once the 

debt, equity and insurance projects have been committed, documented, and disbursed. DFC must also 

grow its development impact monitoring and evaluation function and expand its foreign policy team to 

maximize impact for development and foreign policy priorities. Capabilities and staff will be needed for 

DFC’s evolved requirements:

• Adding diversity and inclusion professionals to staff to manage efforts at the agency, led by a Chief 

Diversity and Inclusion Officer (expected to be onboard in FY23).

• Development Impact Monitoring and Evaluation requirements in the BUILD Act.

• Building out an effective Equity program for the full lifecycle of investments.

• Financial Transformation from OPIC and DCA to DFC – new programs, larger portfolio, more 

complex financial operations, reporting and audits, greater focus on internal controls and 

oversight.

• Expand our foreign policy expertise and coordination in house by bringing on policy experts who 

can help drive regional portfolios that advance American national security

• Scaling transaction support, including lawyers, social and environmental staff, credit, risk and 

monitoring personnel, and teams that provide information to the public and Congress.

• Meeting requirements of increased governance, full transparency, and new appropriations 

mechanisms and reporting requirements.

• Keeping pace in Corporation operations to ensure the overall functioning of a larger and more 

complex Corporation—procurement, facilities, human capital, COVID mandates, information 

security, and hybrid workplace and IT capabilities and governance.

• Navigating complexities of our overseas footprint, from setting up people in the field to providing 

effective administrative support.

As DFC continues to grow, it will be important to assess and streamline existing processes, and as 

needed, develop new processes to improve efficiency of deploying capital and carrying out the mission. 

Additionally, the DFC has developed a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Accessibility (DEIA) strategy that

commits the Agency to improving, cultivating, and enabling DFC’s diverse workforce through 

transformative leadership and sound data analysis with optimal organizational capacity. To that end, the 

Corporation is focused on:
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• Improving focus on fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace and culture, amid a challenging 

hiring landscape and the added difficulty of cultural cohesion across a hybrid federal workforce.

• Launching affinity groups and allies groups to support employees.

• Continue building a culture of monitoring and evaluating impact and performance against targets, 

to include developmental and financial measures of performance.

• Improving processes for transaction clearance and due diligence to reduce approval time for 

pipeline transactions.

• Improving management of data across the lifecycle of a transaction and develop standard 

procedures.