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CDC Group

Telephone
02079634700
Location
123 Victoria Street
London
London
London
SW1E 6DE
GB

Background to CDC

CDC is the world’s oldest development finance institution (DFI), founded in 1948. Our mission is to support the building of businesses throughout Africa and South Asia, to create jobs and make a lasting difference to people’s lives in some of the world’s poorest places. Between 2004 and 2011, CDC’s strategy was to provide capital to businesses in emerging markets through private equity funds. Since 2012, we have been through an exciting transformation, and now provide capital in all its forms, investing both directly and through fund managers that are aligned with our aims.

               

CDC aims to invest in countries where the private sector is weak and jobs are scarce and in sectors where growth leads to jobs. We assess every investment for its potential to create jobs and we take a commercial approach to our investing and lending activities because development impact is well correlated with strong financial performance. However, as a DFI, we can take a flexible and patient approach because value creation in our markets often takes many years to materialise.

CDC is wholly owned by the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID) and plays a key role in DFID’s private sector strategy to alleviate poverty.  We invest from our own balance sheet and it is a measure of CDC’s high quality investment processes that despite investing in regions of the world that are typically considered very high risk, we have received no new capital from government since 1995 and remain self-funding. 

CDC invests in a number of ways:

- placing capital with expert fund managers (GPs) who then use their local knowledge and expertise to find promising businesses in which to invest;

- providing direct investments or co-investing in specific businesses, including alongside local GPs; and

- making loans, guarantees and offering micro-finance support

Following the change in strategic direction in 2011/12, we have significantly built our team. We are looking to continue this process over the coming months, in particular to attract high quality investment professionals who are motivated to use their skills to develop the private sector in Africa and South Asia.

For further information, see www.cdcgroup.com

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