Invest International

Invest International

Invest International was established in 2021 by the Dutch Ministry of Finance and FMO, the Netherlands' development finance institution, as a joint-venture response to the fragmentation in development finance. Rather than issuing grants from an aid budget, the Dutch state consolidated several public investment programs — including the Dutch Good Growth Fund (DGFF), Develop2Build (D2B), and the Development Related Infrastructure Investment Vehicle (DRIVE) — under a single commercial entity tasked with generating returns while advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Joost Oorthuizen, formerly CEO of the Sustainable Trade Initiative, served as the founding chief executive and shaped the institution's mandate around bankable, large-scale infrastructure projects that require blended capital stacks. The firm allocates across infrastructure, healthcare, renewable energy, agribusiness, and water management — typically in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia. Its transaction model relies on co-investment and public-private partnership structures, combining concessional government grants, FMO's development-finance loans, and commercial bank participation. Documented investments include the Msimbazi Basin Development Project, a mixed-use flood-mitigation and urban development initiative in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, developed alongside the World Bank. The portfolio also includes Gaziantep City Hospital in Türkiye, a public-private partnership healthcare facility; the Giant Sea Wall Initiative, a coastal defense and land-reclamation project in Indonesia; and Rubavu Port, an industrial logistics asset on Lake Kivu in Rwanda. The firm's scale is derived from the public balance sheets it consolidates rather than from a traditional AUM figure. It manages multiple dedicated development-finance vehicles on behalf of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with a team headquartered in The Hague, and it is a signatory to the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF) and Code-V, a network promoting equal access to finance for women entrepreneurs. In the 24 months leading to mid-2026, the firm continued project execution within its DRIVE and D2B facilities, including loan deployment to a berry-growing operation in Namibia, indicating an active posture in productive agriculture across frontier markets. Invest International's structural differentiator is its dual-entity ownership: the Dutch Ministry of Finance anchors the capital base as majority owner, while FMO brings underwriting discipline and credit-committee governance from its own balance sheet. This hybrid structure means investment decisions are subject to both parliamentary accountability and DFI-risk frameworks, a governance tension that can slow deployment but yields a negotiating position no single-aid agency or private commercial bank can replicate when assembling sovereign-guaranteed project finance in the world's hardest-to-finance markets.