FMO and the European Commission (EC) have signed on 18.12.2018 the first EU guarantee agreement under the European Sustainable Development Fund (EFSD), part of the European Union’s (EU) External Investment Plan (EIP) for Sub-Saharan Africa and the European Neighborhood: the Nasira Risk-Sharing Facility (Nasira).
Nasira will use 75 000 000 EUR of EU funds (guarantee) to leverage up to 750 000 000 EUR of investments for specific underbanked groups of entrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa and the EU Neighborhood.
The specific target groups of underbanked entrepreneurs are (Themes):
— internally displaced people, refugees and returnees or irregular migrant entrepreneurs (IMEs),
— women and young people aged 18-35 years (women and young).
FMO envisages a tranching structure for NASIRA which encompasses four basis note tranches.
NASIRA is an innovative risk sharing facility guaranteeing Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) loan portfolio’s distributed by local Financial Institutions. The target groups consist of underbanked entrepreneurs in Middle East/North African and the Sub Saharan Region. End borrowers are women (female entrepreneurs), young (18-35 years) and irregular migrants.
A portfolio consists of approximately between 100 and 5 000 individual MSME loans in which average amount is between 500 USD — 250 000 USD.
The project NASIRA has been established to guide the implementation of NASIRA. It has deliverables such as the legal framework, the contract with the European Commission, a technical assistance program, a risk model, mid-office administration set-up and process descriptions.
The requirements for the IT services, needed to administer the portfolios, are described in the underlying document.
The ICT scope which is required for the facilitation of the program NASIRA consists of two main services.
These two main services are highly integrated. The content of the services is described below.
Service 1: Delivery and implementation of a solution – The solution required for the administration of securitized SME loans needs to be cloud-hosted and should be implemented and connected to the existing infrastructure of FMO.; and
Service 2: Onboarding of approximately 40 Financial Institutions consists of assessing whether the organization is technically and functionally capable of delivering portfolio data on a monthly basis in the format of the dataset. This includes a maturity assessment, a check on the consistency and definition of the data and the mapping of the data fields with the format of the dataset.