Interactive: Where does MIGA invest?

The increased emphasis on blended finance by development financiers is calling attention to one of the least known organizations of the World Bank Group — the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, or MIGA. Guarantees, such as the political risk guarantees provided by MIGA, are one of several instruments used to promote private sector investment in development projects. By taking on certain risks, MIGA makes socially impactful but risky investments more palatable for private sector funders and institutional investors. MIGA’s large dataset of guarantees dating back to 1990 is publicly available. This data can help tell the story of MIGA’s growing importance, the types of investments it guarantees, and the types of investors it works with. The figures include closed, active, and proposed MIGA guarantee projects. Projects were allocated based on the year when its document — project briefs for active and closed projects, and summaries of proposed guarantees for proposed projects — was released. Amounts do not carry over into subsequent years of coverage. The data shows how MIGA’s annual portfolio of guarantees has grown. During the 1990s, it stayed between $50 million and $1.3 billion, and between $1 billion and $2.1 billion from 2000 to 2010, before growing to $8.7 billion in 2017 ($4.93 billion of which is active, and $3.78 billion of which is proposed). The total amount guaranteed by MIGA from 1990 through 2017 is about $55.2 billion. Of this, $24.1 billion is active, 20.7 billion is not active, and $10.4 billion is proposed). An additional $6.3 billion in guarantees are already in MIGA’s data for 2018, including $1.5 billion in active projects and $4.8 billion in proposed projects. This progress has been partially driven by modest growth in the number of guarantees made by MIGA each year, but primarily by the size of the guarantees made. From 1990 to 2012, the size of the average MIGA guarantee each year increased slowly from around $33 million to about $75 million. From 2013 onwards, the average guarantee was almost always over $100 million, topping out at an annual average of $220 million per guarantee in 2016. Note that in recent years these averages incorporates both active and proposed guarantees. Breaking down the guarantee data further, we can see MIGA’s sectoral and geographic priorities and how they have changed over time. Investments in the banking, finance, extractives, and energy sectors have been the primary transactions guaranteed by MIGA since 1990, and have skyrocketed recently. This has been driven by investors in these sectors who applied for more and larger guarantees than in others. Runner-up sectors whose investments are frequently guaranteed by MIGA include manufacturing and services, and non-energy infrastructure. There is a concentration in the geographical origins of MIGA investors. The growth in the dollar amount and number of MIGA guarantees since 1990 has been driven by the increasing size and number of guarantee applications from European investors. Since 2006, guarantees for investments by European entities have comprised more than 50 percent of annual MIGA guarantees. The majority of the guarantee holders were banks, such as Banco Santander, UniCredit, and others. Some of the guarantees were for investments in developing market branches of the banks themselves, as with Austrian Raiffeisen Bank International, which guaranteed investments in many of its Balkan country entities. Others invested in developing market infrastructure, such as HSBC’s guarantees of more the more than $1 billion invested in the Angolan Cambambe Hydroelectric project from 2013 to 2016. There is diversity in the geographical destinations of MIGA-backed investments. Africa-destined investments have recently surged to comprise the majority of MIGA-backed transactions in 2015, 2016, and 2017, but thus far in 2018, they are outpaced by investments in Latin America and Asia. The increases in guarantees for all those regions — particularly in Africa — has been driven by increased guarantees for banking and extractives-related investments. Some examples from the past four years in Africa include a $750 million guarantee for Deutsche Bank’s investment in the Angolan Lauca hydroelectric power development, a $300 million guarantee for Kinross Gold’s investment in the Tasiast mine in Mauritania, and two guarantees worth $137 and $118 million for Lekela Power’s investments in wind power developments in South Africa and Senegal. In Asia, there is an abundance of hydropower project guarantees, the largest held by Japanese organizations, including MUFG and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. Similar projects are being developed or are proposed in Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Armenia, and Georgia. MIGA’s guarantees data contains far more detail than is presented in this analysis, and can be accessed on their webpage. You can also analyze the past and proposed guarantees data on on interactive visualization of MIGA guarantees data. Update, June 21, 2018: This article has been updated to better delineate differences between past and proposed guarantees in MIGA's portfolio.