Development finance conferences mostly provide two pieces of news: the figure that is released in the press release itself, and the transactions behind it. The 51st Annual Meeting of the Islamic Development Bank Group, which has ended in Baku after four days of conference, did so too.

While the figure - $4.7 billion worth of agreements and memoranda signed at the Private Sector Forum, compared to $3.6 billion of last year’s corresponding conference, is actual and amounts to a rise of 30%, the transactions behind it say more than the total itself: Karabagh irrigation canal, SOCAR private equity partnership, SME financing facility for Azerbaijani commercial bank, sovereign debt capacity building and ten-year country strategy framework which did not exist before.

Signed agreements sector-by-sector

Alongside the formal agenda for June 18th was a meeting that merits special focus in its own right. President Ilham Aliyev met with a delegation that consisted of heads of all the member institutions of the Arab Coordination Group, an organization made up of development funds of the Arab world, as well as the finance ministers of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

The ACG has loaned to more than 13,000 development projects across 160 countries since 1975. Seven heads of development........

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