An Experiment in Creative Financing to Promote South African Reconciliation and Development

This paper discusses a project designed to address 3 seemingly unconnected problems:1) How to promote private reconciliation in South Africa, that is reconciliation between black and white South Africans that is independent of the effort to promote reconciliation between the state and those who suffered under apartheid2) How to involve the South African expatriate community in the process of reconciliation and development in South Africa, and3) How to mobilize and deliver funding for projects that are both too rich for grant funding because they generate a stream of revenue that can be used to service debts and other financial obligations and too poor for commercial funding either because of the scale of the project or the risk and return profile of the project. The paper describes the innovative funding structure that has been developed to simultaneously address all three of these issues and some of the interesting financial, legal and policy issues that it raises