As governments face rising debt burdens, constrained public budgets and enormous infrastructure needs, International Finance Corporation Managing Director Makhtar Diop is pushing the World Bank Group to mobilize substantially more private investment into emerging markets, as job creation serves as the ultimate measure of success.
Diop has led the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank Group institution focused on private-sector development, since March 2021. Under his leadership, IFC commitments have grown sharply, reaching a record $71.7 billion in fiscal year 2025, including financing mobilized from other investors, up from $56 billion the previous year.
But Diop’s ambition extends beyond increasing IFC’s own financing.
In a June 2026 interview with El País, he said that when he took over IFC, the institution mobilized roughly one additional dollar of third-party capital for every dollar deployed from its own balance sheet. Today, he said, that figure is closer to three dollars for every IFC dollar, with an objective of pushing the ratio higher.
That strategy places Makhtar Diop near the center of a broader shift in development finance: using multilateral balance sheets, guarantees and expertise to attract much larger pools of commercial capital into developing economies.
From Dakar to the World Bank
A Senegalese economist, Makhtar Diop has spent his career at the intersection of government, international finance and development.
He worked in banking and at the International Monetary Fund before serving as Senegal’s Minister of Economy and Finance around the turn of the century, where he gained experience implementing economic reforms. He later moved through several senior World Bank positions, including country director for Brazil and for Kenya, Eritrea and Somalia.
Makhtar Diop subsequently spent six years as the World Bank’s Vice President for Africa, overseeing a record $70 billion in commitments to Sub-Saharan Africa, before becoming Vice President for Infrastructure, responsible for sectors including energy, transport, digital development and public-private partnerships.
He became IFC Managing Director on March 1, 2021.
That combination of public-sector and development-finance experience has shaped his focus on a persistent problem: why so little of the world’s institutional capital reaches many emerging and frontier economies.
Closing the Investment Gap
Makhtar Diop argues that the constraint is not simply a shortage of global capital.
Large asset managers, pension funds and other institutional investors control trillions of dollars, but many emerging-market projects struggle to meet their requirements on scale, predictability, currency exposure and risk.
In his El País interview, Diop identified policy uncertainty, insufficient guarantees, foreign-exchange risk, shortages of equity capital and a lack of experienced local partners as recurring barriers cited by investors.
IFC’s response has been to combine direct investment with guarantees, project structuring, local-currency financing and efforts to bring additional investors into transactions.
Scale is particularly important in Africa. Diop told Reuters in November 2025 that major global investors often seek opportunities of $1 billion or more, while many projects on the continent remain substantially smaller. He has consequently advocated larger investment platforms, deeper regional markets and more local-currency financing.
That local-currency strategy has continued to expand. In April 2026, IFC established a 1.6 billion South African rand ($98 million) borrowing facility with Citigroup aimed at increasing rand-denominated financing for private companies and reducing foreign-exchange exposure.
Building Bridges to Global Capital
A recent expansion into Spain illustrates how IFC is trying to move closer to the investors it hopes to mobilize.
The World Bank Group opened a new office in Madrid in June 2026, intended in part to increase private investment from Spanish companies and financial institutions into emerging markets.
IFC already has a long-term committed portfolio of roughly $5 billion with Spanish companies, with significant activity linked to Latin America. Makhtar Diop has described Spain as a potential bridge connecting European capital with opportunities across Latin America, Africa and other developing regions.
The Madrid expansion reflects the broader strategy: rather than relying only on direct public financing, multilateral institutions are increasingly trying to use their capital and risk-bearing capacity to make more projects viable for commercial investors.
Jobs as the Measure
Makhtar Diop has repeatedly emphasized that mobilizing capital is not the end goal.
“Our objective is to create jobs,” he told El País, stressing the importance of sustainable and durable employment.
That focus aligns with the World Bank Group’s broader emphasis on employment as developing economies absorb rapidly growing working-age populations.
For Makhtar Diop, private-sector development therefore connects several challenges at once: infrastructure shortages, access to finance, economic growth and the ability of economies to create enough productive jobs.
The Limits of the Model
The strategy, however, is far from guaranteed to work at the scale its advocates envision.
Despite years of international efforts to move from “billions to trillions” in development finance, institutional capital has proved difficult to mobilize into emerging and developing markets at the levels once anticipated.
An April 2026 analysis from the Center for Global Development concluded that more than a decade of efforts to draw institutional investors from advanced economies into these markets had fallen short, arguing that stronger domestic financial systems may be just as important as attracting foreign capital.
There is also a structural tension at the heart of development finance: the countries and projects with the greatest social needs are often those carrying the highest risks and lowest expected commercial returns.
That leaves IFC and other development institutions with a critical test. Higher mobilization ratios matter only if capital reaches markets that would otherwise struggle to attract investment and generates measurable development outcomes.
Why Makhtar Diop Matters Now
That question is becoming more urgent as governments contend with debt pressures, tighter aid budgets and growing investment requirements across energy, transport, digital infrastructure, agriculture and climate resilience.
Traditional public financing alone is unlikely to meet those needs.
That has increased pressure on multilateral development banks to stretch their balance sheets further through guarantees, blended finance, local-currency lending, risk-sharing arrangements and greater mobilization of private investors.
Makhtar Diop has made IFC one of the most prominent testing grounds for that model.
If the approach works, it could help redefine how emerging markets finance growth. If it falls short, it will reinforce longstanding questions about whether global capital can truly be redirected toward the economies and communities that need it most.
For governments, investors and development institutions alike, that makes Makhtar Diop, and the model he is advancing, increasingly important to watch.
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