Leadership matters
At the IAF, empowerment, engagement, and consensus with community partners and beneficiaries are central elements of our vision and values. We carry out our mandate of identifying, supporting, and partnering with disadvantaged people in Latin America and the Caribbean by responding with grant support for the most creative ideas for self-help from community organizations. We call upon these marginalized communities to create and lead their own projects, and we help mobilize matching resources.
We work with local leaders to address challenges on behalf of their communities and to promote accountability and transparency within their own governments. This approach allows community leaders to innovate and gain experience that will continue to serve them as they fulfill their roles. In this way, we also support growth within the next generation of private, public and civil society actors in the region.
We also practice adaptive management, which allows our core constituency—community organizations at the beginning stages of development—the time needed to use their resources responsibly. Our investments often focus on building the skills and capacity leaders need to sustain their efforts beyond our support.
Talk about community-led development!
Recent News and Stories
Investments for Impact: A Visit to Costa Rican Microbusinesses
Meet the rural business owners who are benefitting from our first-ever impact investment in Empresa para el Desarrollo, a Costa Rican microcredit lender.
Community Resilience in the Time of COVID-19: Lessons from the 2017 Mexican Earthquakes
For international humanitarian relief, it may seem faster and more efficient to respond with a “one-size-fits-all” approach to disaster recovery. But communities that lead their own solutions are more engaged throughout recovery, ultimately rebuilding stronger.
Cultivating Women’s Leadership in Cacao Production
In Guatemala, indigenous leadership of an export enterprise is rare, and indigenous women’s leadership is even rarer. Our grantee partner ProPetén is committed to training its Q’eqchi’ cacao producers to succeed in a complex marketplace.