The Agence Française de Développement (AFD), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank will co-host a Marketplace on Innovative Financial Solutions for Development to be held in Paris on March 4-5, 2010. The Marketplace seeks to garner and highlight fresh ideas on financial solutions for development. It is dedicated to innovative financial mechanisms for better mobilizing, channeling, and using funds. The Marketplace will bring together an internationally diverse set of hundreds of development practitioners, donors, philanthropists, and social entrepreneurs, and academics, representatives from a range of financial institutions, civil society, and policy makers.

Objectives

The key objectives of the Marketplace are to:

• advance the agenda on innovative financial solutions for development;

• facilitate knowledge-sharing and learning, including South/South learning, about which approaches work, which don't, and how to design solutions to maximize impact and cost-effectiveness; and

• spur the evolution of cutting-edge projects that apply innovative financial mechanisms to development challenges.

Grant Competition

A key feature of the event is a grant competition to garner and highlight fresh ideas on how innovative financing mechanisms can be used to better solve development challenges at local, country, regional, or global levels, with the goal that successful innovations can be scaled up and replicated broadly. Up to 5 grants of up to US$100,000 each will be awarded. For more information see the Competition guidelines.

For more detail information, please consult the official website of the event here