Central America

This is a key project ded­i­cat­ed to gen­der equal­i­ty and the pro­mo­tion of women’s eco­nom­ic rights. As part of this project, CEN­PROMYPE and Luxembourg’s Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion have iden­ti­fied the need for a ded­i­cat­ed invest­ment fund for female entre­pre­neurs in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca. Work to estab­lish such a fund domi­ciled in Lux­em­bourg began in 2023 and Luxembourg’s Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion declared it was inter­est­ed in con­tribut­ing to the financ­ing of the fund, fol­low­ing the Euro­pean Micro­fi­nance Week in Lux­em­bourg in Novem­ber 2023.

The ​“Forestry and Cli­mate Fund” (FCCF) impact invest­ment fund, launched in 2017 at Luxembourg’s ini­tia­tive as a pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship, con­tin­ues to pro­mote the sus­tain­able exploita­tion of wood and asso­ci­at­ed val­ue chains in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca. Luxembourg’s Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion sup­ports the FCCF through tech­ni­cal assis­tance from LuxDev as part of a project focused on sus­tain­able for­est man­age­ment. The project’s objec­tive is to reha­bil­i­tate sec­ondary or degrad­ed for­est areas and make them eco­nom­i­cal­ly, eco­log­i­cal­ly and social­ly viable. Par­tic­u­lar empha­sis is placed on pro­mot­ing youth employ­ment, as well as social inclu­sion in for­est management.

Since 2019, Lux­em­bourg has been sup­port­ing the NGO Front Line Defend­ers (FLD) in sup­port of the emer­gency pro­tec­tion and secu­ri­ty of human rights defend­ers (HRDs), ini­tial­ly in Nicaragua only and sub­se­quent­ly, since 2023, also in Guatemala, El Sal­vador and Hon­duras. The project’s cur­rent phase runs until the end of 2025 and sup­ports per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al secu­ri­ty mea­sures, emer­gency relo­ca­tions, legal fees, med­ical expens­es, fam­i­ly sup­port and infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy and com­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment for HRDs who are at risk.

At the sub-region­al lev­el, in 2023 the MFA also con­tin­ued to sup­port the NGO ADA in its work to pro­mote youth entre­pre­neur­ship and the struc­tur­ing of for­est val­ue chains, as well as region­al micro­fi­nance and micro-insur­ance. In the same vein, in Jan­u­ary 2023 Luxembourg’s Devel­op­ment Coop­er­a­tion launched a region­al project with the Alliance for Finan­cial Inclu­sion (AFI) in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean, which aims to imple­ment inno­v­a­tive finan­cial inclu­sion strate­gies in the region and fos­ter knowl­edge shar­ing in this field, with a focus on dig­i­tal finan­cial ser­vices, inclu­sive fin­tech, nation­al inclu­sive finance plans (espe­cial­ly in Cos­ta Rica), green inclu­sive finance and gen­der-inclu­sive finance.

Addi­tion­al­ly, there are devel­op­ment coop­er­a­tion projects with the IMF’s Region­al Tech­ni­cal Assis­tance Cen­tre for Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and the Domini­can Repub­lic (CAP­TAC-DR) aimed at strength­en­ing nation­al capac­i­ties, with the Inter­na­tion­al Orga­ni­za­tion for Migra­tion (IOM) for migrant women in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, with UN Women to work on the finan­cial inclu­sion of women in the North­ern Tri­an­gle, and with the Unit­ed Nations Pop­u­la­tion Fund (UNF­PA), seek­ing to reduce preg­nan­cies among dis­ad­van­taged teenagers in com­mu­ni­ties along the Caribbean coast.