Education, Youth, and Employment Bond — Inter-American Development Bank
Author: Michèle Manpreet Ryatt, supported by NORRAG
In 2014, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) issued its first set of bonds to direct funds to-ward governmental projects targeting education, youth, and employment (EYE) in Latin America and the Caribbean (IDB, 2014). EYE bonds are a type of social bonds. Social bonds are any type of bond instrument that is exclusively applied to finance, or re-finance in part, new or existing eligible social projects.
By 2019, the IDB reported to have cumulatively raised USD 1.82 billion through 36 EYE bonds across 8 currencies. In 2019, the total available funds from active EYE bonds were invested into scaled pro-jects located in countries in South and Central America as well as the Caribbean: USD 716 million was invested into 20 projects dedicated to education, USD 60 million was invested into 6 youth pro-jects, and USD 95 million to projects targeting employment.
According to the projected impact of the EYE bond programs, the investments from 2018 to 2022 will benefit 3 million students and train 179,000 teachers. Further, the investments will benefit 288,000 young people through youth programs and 529,000 people in the work force by developing oppor-tunities and training skills (IDB, 2019b).