Michael Crabb
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the next episode of the Energy Impact podcast. I'm your host Michael Crabb and I'm really excited to be joined today by Andy Herscowitz, the Chief Development Officer at the US International Development Finance Corporation. Andy, great to have you on.

Andy Herscowitz
Great, thanks for having me.

Michael Crabb
Well, I can't wait to get into all the exciting work that you're doing. But perhaps first, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up? How did you end up on the path that you are today?

Andy Herscowitz
Great. So I grew up just outside of Washington, DC in Maryland, and spent- basically did everything all through high school there. And then I stayed local in Washington, DC and I went to Georgetown for undergraduate. And then between undergraduate and law school, which is also Georgetown, I spent a year in Nicaragua doing development work at a volunteer program that Georgetown had. I also, in high school, had done- was an exchange student in Dominican Republic, so I got this itch for working in developing countries and for pursuing development as a career very, very early. I tell people that the first words in Spanish that I learned were "No hay agua, ni hay luz" - there's no water and there's no power. And the power and the water would go out suddenly. And it's not an exaggeration. Those are literally the first words I learned when I was an exchange student in Dominican Republic. I knew that I really wanted to go into development. But after law school, I went to work at a law firm, worked at two different law firms for a few years. But every time a head hunter or others would try to recruit me for something, I'd say I want to go overseas. If you have anything overseas, I don't really care what it pays, let me know. And then I was talking to a colleague in the office next to mine and he had told me about how he had grown up overseas where his father was a lawyer for the US Agency for International Development. And he- we were talking about it several times, so I started looking into that, and applied several times over a few years. And I finally was lucky enough to get selected to be what was then a regional legal adviser for USAID. And that started my career in government. Now, 20 years later, I'm at the US International Development Finance Corporation where I'm its first chief development officer.

Andy Herscowitz
Yeah, enough on your resume to fill maybe four or five episodes. But I am curious, kind of going back to your first trip to Nicaragua and what sort of caused that interest? I mean, your buddies are probably what? Skateboarding or playing football and you're like, I want to go travel and help develop countries. How does that come about?

Andy Herscowitz
I think it was the time when I was only 16 years old when I was in Dominican Republic in a developing country and just realizing that there was this whole world out there. Plus I grew up in Washington, DC, went to college there. I need to get out. And here I am, I'm back here again. But it really was interesting how different the cultures were, looking at what the infrastructure needs were, and then reflecting back on the US. And I remember, our group of Georgetown students in Nicaragua, we've talked about what Nicaragua, since the early 90s, what Nicaragua needed to get on a path towards development. It was the poorest country in the hemisphere, after Haiti. And I'd always reflect on the US and why the US really took off. And I've got a whole bunch of views on what made the US develop in the way that it did. But one of them was a heavy focus on infrastructure. We saw like, when the roads were built, the cross-country highways were built, the businesses that pop up along, where the railroads were built, the businesses, the cities that pop up. You see that building out the infrastructure creates the economic growth that lift people out of poverty. And I used to say - and I guess I'm dating myself - but in the US, you go anywhere in America and there would be a Blockbuster Video and a McDonald's. Now, there aren't Blockbuster Videos anymore, but the point was is that anywhere in America you would go and you have this infrastructure and jobs get created around that. So then when I was living in Nicaragua, we talked about that and I saw it firsthand. I was pretty cynical about the work of USAID at the time, had long hair and a ponytail and USAID came to town one day. They all pulled up in their fancy cars, in their khaki pants and their Oxford shirts - I'm now that guy, right - but I'm like, there's USAID doing really great work. Well, what I realized shortly thereafter was USAID was doing really great work, because one of the programs they did, it was like a jobs or works program. And the town that I lived in, there were only dirt roads in a town. But over a period of about three or four weeks, they came in, and they brought interlocking blocks, like pavers basically. They employed pretty much every able-bodied person in that town for about a month where people got extra money. And then what was left behind were these very nice paved roads for the town, which is maybe a few thousand people. Then what people did with that extra money was one guy - it was a fishing village - one guy bought a cooler so that he could preserve his fish longer and let him cut out a middleman, so he made more money. Another person bought a refrigerator that he was using to sell Coke. And I saw just firsthand how those types of economic stimulation projects could transform a small village and it was really impactful. So I really resolved myself to saying, This is something that I want to do to see what we could do to try to improve the lives of others.

Andy Herscowitz
Yeah. Well, really fantastic. So you go back to law school. You're practicing in a firm for a little bit. There are a lot of other podcasts that people can learn about that, so we'll fast forward through those years. And then I think you ended up in Peru first. Is that right?

Andy Herscowitz
I was lucky, I went back to the Dominican Republic.

Michael Crabb
Tell us abou that transition.

Andy Herscowitz
I went back to the Dominican Republic. I spent five years there as the Regional Legal Advisor, covering the whole Caribbean. I spent a lot of time in Haiti. It shares the island of Haiti. When I first joined you USAID, I was the lawyer for what's called the development credit authority office. It was the loan guarantee program, the brand new program. The idea was that USAID, for years, had been using mostly grants and contracts where you go into a country say, This is a problem we want to solve. Let's either give a grants or hire a contractor to work on solving that problem. What the development credit authority did was it got people to think a little bit differently, got them thinking, how can we use the private sector with their profit motive to solve the development problem? You want to create jobs? How can we go to a local bank and give it a guarantee they're gonna do lending to a whole bunch of small businesses? So that was the idea, was using our money to help encourage loan guarantees. When I was in Dominican Republic, I helped work on some of the very first loan guarantee programs, even in Haiti. And I got a lot of pushback from people back in Washington at the time, because their view was, there was just a coup in the country a few months ago. Haiti has a lot of coup d'états. And my response to them is the one constant that you've seen in Haiti over the last 50 years has been the banking sector. So if anybody understands the risk of doing business in Haiti, it's these banks which have survived. So we went forward, and we moved forward on those projects. There really weren't any significant defaults that I'm aware of, so it was very successful. It's really- what I came up with is that people need to- people assume there's a certain amount of risk in places, but to really make a difference from a development standpoint, you have to be willing to dig in and really understand where the real risks are.

Andy Herscowitz
And so how do you go about evaluating that, right? I mean, the gap between perception and reality in some of these countries, I imagine, is quite large. How do you go about sort of convincing people back in Washington that these institutions will survive? That history is a good indication of future performance when it's, you just keep- how do you know, right?

Andy Herscowitz
You have to do- you obviously do due diligence, but you also rely heavily on people in the field. But you have to keep in the back of your mind something really important that people forget about, right? The US government will pay a contractor or give them a grant to do something for us to achieve a goal. Now, if you have a choice between taking $10 million and building a solar array and just building it, you're never going to get that money back, because you're just paying someone to build it and you're going to leave it behind. If you have the option of saying. You know what, let's get somebody else to build it and they are going to be the ones who sell the power and we're going to lend them $10 million. You might lose the money, but most the time you won't lose the money. And if you have 10 projects for $100 million and you lose out on one of them, the US taxpayers spent 10 million instead of 100 million. Whereas if you just build 10 of those projects, US taxpayers spent $100 million. You've got to do due diligence. You can't just give money away, lend money without your due diligence. But you also can't kill yourself. And there's like, fearing that you might lose some money. You have to be willing to take the risk, because the whole point of your existence is to try to promote private sector development in really difficult environments, while not displacing private banks and others who would otherwise do the lending. That's the role of the private sector development finance institutions and development institutions.

Andy Herscowitz
Yeah, so really kind of bridging that gap a little bit. Makes a lot of sense. Maybe talk about how you've seen that evolve. This is what, in the mid-2000s, or mid to late 2000s, right? So you've seen energy- at that time, solar projects were probably, were cutting edge, right? I mean, maybe talk about how that's kind of evolved and then we can come into your new role.

Andy Herscowitz
Then from the Dominican Republic, I moved to Peru where I ended up becoming the USAID Deputy Mission Director. And then I moved on to Ecuador. While I was in Ecuador, I got a call about a new initiative that President Obama was looking at launching during his second term that wanted to focus on energy in Africa. I was asked to come back and help design and launch this new initiative. We did it and we ended up launching it, called Power Africa. With Power Africa, I moved to Nairobi, where it was the first ever presidential initiative to be based in the field. And we built it from really nothing over- I did it for seven years. I eventually moved to South Africa and I spent five years there as well, because there were some issues with the West being attacked where it just became difficult for us to operate there. And then grew it to become the largest public private partnership for development in history. We got over 170 partners - private companies, bilateral and multilateral institutions at different countries, different banks - supported Power Africa. And we helped over 120 power projects reach financial close and helped over 100 million people get access to electricity. But again, it was that idea of using the private sector to advance our development goals. One of the things that people would criticize me for was saying that I was taking credit for the work that other people were doing. And my response was, that is exactly what I'm doing. If not me, we should be. I said, You should be taking credit for the work that we're doing. Because it's not about trying to show like, Look what we did, pat us on the back. We're trying to solve a development issue, when we all need to figure out who can do what best. And so we got 12 US government agencies working seamlessly well together, where instead of everyone fighting over who should be doing what, we figured out, Okay, OPIC at the time - which is now DFC, where I work - can do the financing of projects. The US Trade and Development Agency specializes in doing feasibility studies, so they are going to do the feasibility studies. Sometimes, often in the countries, you don't have the proper enabling environment, the people who have the capacity to understand the newer technologies. So USAID would provide the technical assistance and the training. We all got together and had a working group. And then we also asked each of our private sector partners and others to make a commitment towards achieving the high-level goals that we want to achieve, which were 30,000 megawatts, 60 million electrical connections - which is about 300 million people getting access to electricity, and essentially doubling access to electricity in Sub Saharan Africa. We all were working towards common goals, but working really well together.

Andy Herscowitz
Wow. Yeah, those numbers are kind of mind boggling, right? And there still feels like there's so much work to be done-

Andy Herscowitz
There's a lot of work to be done.

Michael Crabb
- which is maybe a good segue to the evolution of that agency and how the USAID kind of became the Development Finance Corporation, maybe talk a little bit about that, and then we can dive into your role, which as I understand is a relatively new position.

Andy Herscowitz
Okay, so USAID did not become Development Finance Corporation. OPIC became Development Finance. Corporation. USAID still exists doing great work. The administrator of USAID is the vice chair of DFC's board, so we work really closely hand in hand with USAID. But really the place where like- I'll give you an example of where the evolution of working with the private sector has evolved - something outside of the power sector - but if you think about the vaccines and what's going on globally. Back in 2001, when I first joined USAID, there was a team of lawyers and others who I worked with there who were actively working at creating Gavi, which was meant to be the global vaccine alliance, right? This was like the first time we were working with the Gates Foundation, private and public working together to figure out how can we create an organization that brings public and private resources together to solve a major global issue? With the same time that we helped create the Global Fund for HIV AIDS, TB and malaria, we also helped create the Global Alliance for improved nutrition, so the nutrition sort of global organization. Fast forward 20 years, we're at the height the COVID pandemic, USAID is actively buying and helping development of vaccines globally and production of vaccines globally, buying hundreds of millions of vaccines and distributing globally. At the same time, we now have DFC which exists to provides financing. And so what DFC is able to do is provide risk insurance to Gavi, the same entity that we helped create 20 years ago, which now wants to sell vaccines to the middle income countries. The middle income countries can afford the vaccines. But Gavi needs some assurance that they're going to get paid if they agree to sell them to them. Now DFC is able to provide that insurance, which then allows us to move billions of vaccines. We're using both the AID efforts, which are purchasing outright vaccines in the poorest countries where they can't afford them at all. And then you have DFC. We're using, we're supporting this organization that USAID helped create 20 years ago to provide risk insurance so that they can actually sell vaccines to middle income countries and get paid back. I's really a fascinating timeline of what we've done over the last 20 years, to help create the opportunity for the US government and the US taxpayers to have a major, major impact on people all over the world at a relatively small cost to the US taxpayer.

Andy Herscowitz
Yeah, really incredible, different solutions for different scenarios and customers. So can we maybe tie that back to energy? You talked about how many people you touched through Power Africa. Talk a little bit about maybe the energy specific goals that are part of the DFC today and how you're using those tools that you described to facilitate that- I guess I'll call it a transition, but also increased access.

Andy Herscowitz
DFC has established some fairly ambitious climate targets. As an agency, we set the goal of achieving a net-zero portfolio by 2040. We've set the goal of having 33% of our portfolio be climate-related, starting to fiscal year '23, as well. We did a- we want to be at the leading edge of when people talk about new technologies, like distributed renewable energy, as solving all the issues related to access and productive use. Rather than talk about it, DFC issued a call for applications to see whether or not there are in fact commercially viable entities out there that can do this, because it is a challenging sector. And we've got a massive response to that as well. We're really happy with that, because we were nervous whether we'd be able to do that as well. DFC really is leading others to saying put our money where our mouth is. DFC is trying to see, alright, can we help develop this distributed renewable energy sector, so that we can do more than just make sure that people have like a solar lantern, but they actually have productive use so that they're able to run appliances, they're able to run machinery from that type of energy that they have.

Michael Crabb
And so what's the scale? When you say distributed, what's the megawatt range that we're talking about?

Andy Herscowitz
Yeah, distributed- it varies widely. And it varies by the country and the need. We're looking at all types of situations where we're even looking at a small island in- we would consider a project on the islands of Lake Victoria where maybe you need a 10-megawatt solar array, because that's a distributed system. It's not connected to the grid, but a lot of commercial and industrial as well helping companies figure out how to get more reliable power and greener power. Trying to get countries like Nigeria to wean them off the diesel generators that they rely on so heavily that are expensive. The whole idea behind Power Africa really was to figure out how- we were looking at the African countries that were growing at the most rapid rate. And at the time, the majority of the fastest growing economies in the world were in Africa, but we realized that the biggest impediment to the growth was energy. You have a garment manufacturer in Kenya that's churning out 40,000 garments a day. They can't afford to have their power go out and then run expensive diesel backup generators, because then their costs go up. And then they can't remain competitive with China and other countries. We realize that we need to not only focus on access to power, but also reliable power. And that's one that DFC has been doing. OPIC, now DFC, was the biggest contributor to Power Africa's financing of projects. DFC has done over $2 billion of financing for Power Africa project. It was a critical partner amongst the partners that Power Africa had. And I'm really proud of that. DFC also has its first development strategy. We're not just measuring how much money we invest, but it's important that we measure what the outputs are going to be. Now, I tell people that you can brag about spending $10 billion, but what do you achieve with that $10 billion? Is it like- a USAID Administrator, we never go out, go to Congress and brag like I spent $10 billion. The response is then, Well, what did you achieve with that $10 billion? So our roadmap for impact is designed to say, with the $10 billion that we've invested, these are the outputs, this is the number of people who got access to clean water, the number of people who got access to the internet, access to electricity. So that's what we've been doing. So far, in our in our roadmap for impact in the energy sector, we did set a $10 billion goal over by 2025. We all said that we want to make sure that at least 10 million people get access to electricity. And part of our work in doing distributed renewable energy will contribute to that that metric.

Andy Herscowitz
Yeah, fascinating. How do you think about that - I'm gonna kind of pull you a little bit further back to the example you gave, the solar power island - how do you think about reliability, which you sort of also discussed with your garment factory example? How do you think about distributed generation and newer technologies that may be able to solve some of those reliability challenges that the more proven intermittent resources have struggled with?

Andy Herscowitz
There are a lot of really interesting new technologies out there, some of them that aren't even so new, but they haven't been commercially deployed. You think about in the distributed renewable energy space. You've got systems now that are solar, battery, and sometimes a diesel or gas backup as well. But the idea being that, when you do need to run that generator, it can also charge the battery. And hopefully, you just significantly reduced the amount of fuel that you need, or eliminated altogether. \We're looking at all those types of technologies. Battery prices are coming down more and more, as well. As battery prices come down, allows for a greater amount of storage. That I think, we saw the solar transition happen over the last decade where you saw prices come down like 500%, about as low as they're going to go. And now I think we're gonna see that next phase where the output of batteries, or the capacity of batteries will increase, while the prices come down as well.

Andy Herscowitz
What about other- talk more about kind of what you expect here over the coming years? Are there- are you looking at hydrogen, are you looking at nuclear? Are you looking at direct air carbon capture? What's the scope of what the DFC is doing?

Andy Herscowitz
We will look at all technologies. We're not opposed to any technologies, but the key is whether it's commercially viable. And a lot of times people say- like, we'll say, We're not investing in new technologies, but what we will invest in is a technology that has proven to be commercially viable in the United States or in Europe, but it hasn't been deployed yet in Africa or in parts of Asia. We're not doing venture capital right now. But there are a lot of companies out there that are using technologies that exist. And the question is, how do we help them scale. And whether it's directly related to energy and power generation, so small modular nuclear, or hydrogen, or if it's really the emobility. We support some companies, for example, in Africa, that are focused on doing electric motorcycles. Getting people to- and then some of them are doing battery swapping as well, which is really exciting. We want to be right there to help the companies that are seeking to grow to see what actually is scalable. Often the best technology or the newest technology isn't the one that scales, but the one that scales is the one that can solve the problems and we want to be there to help companies scale.

Andy Herscowitz
And this might be a good time. I think you knew this, but Kate Steel of Nithio, who you recently funded, was a guest on the podcast as well. Kind of fun when we can tie it that community together. I don't know if you feel comfortable giving any color about that particular deal.

Andy Herscowitz
I thought you're gonna say Kate Steel is popping in as a special guest star. Incredible. No, we're really excited about the work that they're doing and just announced an investment in Nithio, so I think people should watch. I mean, one of the keys to making sure that deals are commercially viable is making sure that you have the data that's necessary to make the right commercial judgments. Nithio is really at the cutting edge of that sector, so we're excited about what they have to offer moving forward.

Andy Herscowitz
Yeah, really, really cool business and opportunity. Coming back, you went out with this call for responses, kind of this RFP. You were worried you weren't going to get a lot of responses. It sounds like you maybe had too many. How do you start going through and prioritizing and sort of allocating the dollars that you have to commit?

Andy Herscowitz
Yeah, I would say there's never too many responses, right? What we showed is that there's clearly demand for this and we've got to figure out if the companies are there and they're not getting the financing they need, we need to figure out what the problem is. Is it a problem with the company? Is it a problem with the type of capital that's available? It's a really great exercise for us to evaluate that. It diverted a lot of resources from a lot of people on our team to review, do a very thoughtful review of each application. And we brought in people from Power Africa as well, who weighed in, and then we have a partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation. Rockefeller agreed to commit $50 million to help us de-risk our investments in distributed renewable energy. We also have a partnership with the Shell Foundation, which agreed to commit some money to help us de-risk investments in the space and energy access space, as well. So we're working closely with those foundations with Power Africa and our really talented team of people at DFC to evaluate them right now.

Andy Herscowitz
It's really great to see private public sector working so closely together. Maybe talk about any themes or lessons learned after reviewing all of those applications. Are there any sort of trends that emerged or other things that you'd be willing to share?

Andy Herscowitz
Look, I think it's still too early to tell, because we're still reviewing them, we're still screening them. I'll be excited to tell you about it when it happens. But I think the lessons learned is that there is demand for this. And people are trying really hard to get the economics to work on distributed renewable energy. It's challenging, particularly in Africa, where people live far from one another, distances are far, economics can be challenging, a regulatory environment can be challenging. So we, as a public sector, have to keep on chipping away at it and see if we can get them to the point of commercial viability.

Andy Herscowitz
Are there - and maybe it's just too different country by country, but you talked about your experience in Haiti - are there lessons that you can apply to Africa and some of the Asian countries that you're focusing on now? I don't know, is there-

Andy Herscowitz
I think it is the perception of risk that you have to overcome, getting comfortable with the fact that DFC and other DFIs and IFIs, the World Bank, you have to remind people who work there, you are not a commercial bank. You're not. And you're creative with public money for the purpose of doing development, which means that you need to be willing to take on more risk. Now that being said, it's easy for me to say that because DFC can be distinguished from other institutions, because we don't have to earn a return for a shareholder, whereas some of these other public institutions do. DFC gets an appropriation from our Congress and we just have to make sure that we're performing, that we have appropriate financial performance, which gives us some space to take a little bit more risk. We're hoping- the whole team is excited about trying to figure out what that will look like, because the entire team at DFC loves our development mandate and we're really trying to start to take off in this regard.

Andy Herscowitz
Super exciting time to be in the office. How many people are on the team? I mean, it seems like a really broad mandate.

Andy Herscowitz
At DFC?

Michael Crabb
Yeah.

Andy Herscowitz
We're relatively small compared to the other DFIs and IFIs. I think when I got there, there were about 300 employees. I think we're over 400 now. During quarantine, we renovated our office spaces, but now we're realizing there aren't enough offices for all the employees that we've hired since then. We're trying to figure out how we're going to handle that as well. We hope to continue to grow, commensurate with the size of our portfolio. We have a $60 billion ceiling that Congress gave us. We're only at just over 30 billion right now in terms of what our committed projects are. We've got a lot of headroom to continue to grow. And to have an impact.

Andy Herscowitz
I mean, 400 people for $60 billion really doesn't seem like a lot. But yeah, that's got to be really fun. Looking forward, besides hitting that 60 billion cap, what do you sort of see in the cards for the next five years, next 10 years for the DFC and these programs in particular?

Andy Herscowitz
It's the impact. For me, it's the impact. When someone jumps on DFCs website and says, What do they even do? You go on the website and it says DFC has helped x million people get access to financing for the first time. It's now helped x million smallholder farmers that DFC has helped bring clean water to people, clean energy to people, internet access to people, so that people see that we're producing results that are directly impacting people, not just dispersing a lot of money. Everyone can hold their chest out, like, look how much money I've dispersed. I tell people, I don't really care how much money is dispersed. I care about whether or not you're achieving the goal that we set out to achieve. And that's development. The first thing money does, that does have development, especially when you bring the first private equity to a low income country, and then you help create that market. But you need to be able to tell that story of why we did the deal, not just we did a deal.

Michael Crabb
It's that flywheel, right? Once you sort of create one power plant and create an ecosystem and then electrical demand grows-

Andy Herscowitz
I'm way more impressed with the very first 10-megawatt solar project in Guinea than I am with the ten 100-megawatt solar projects in India, for example, because you've done the India project. Doesn't mean that there's not still in need, but the tougher ones are those ones where they've never done that project. For me, success would be countries like Botswana and Namibia, really developing their solar potential, because these are countries with very low population density, but some of the highest sun quality in the world and the ability to interconnect to at least eight other countries around them or near them. And you could literally provide power to all of Southern Africa, if not the entire African continent, if you can capture those solar resources. And we know how to do it. It's not like a new technology that we need. The technology exists. It's working out the regulatory framework and having the agreements and making sure you have the transmission infrastructure. That's what we need to do, because if we can figure that out, there'll be no shortage of deals for us to find them.

Michael Crabb
How active of a role- we talked about evaluating risk and the difference between perception and real risk. What we were just alluding to there is sort of creating or evolving regulatory frameworks. How much rope do you have to say, Hey, this has a high impact, but long timeline. We want to really go and work to kind of fix this.

Andy Herscowitz
That's exactly what we have. I mean, we are the ones who will finance a project for twenty years. One of the areas we're looking to get into, which is a really challenging area from a financial commercial viability standpoint, is nature-based solutions, like forest projects. How do you justify giving a $50 million loan for a transaction where you know it's not going to produce any income for 15 years. They're essentially planting trees. And so this is an area where private sector has struggled with, but where we think that DFC and other development finance institutions can play a role, so we're gonna see how we can make a difference there. The other place is with local currency lending. A lot of the deals that that move forward from the DFIs, and even from DFC, we're essentially lending in dollars to people in countries where we know over the 20-year period of that transaction, that their currency is going to depreciate against the dollar. Then you know that it's going to be even more burdensome for them to pay it back 15, 20 years from now. To the extent that we can take the hit, or figure out how to mitigate the risk of that local currency so that the ultimate beneficiary isn't struggling 15 years from now, or 20 years from now goes into default, and we're creating an issue, we need to be able to take that hit as well.

Michael Crabb
Really interesting. There's got to be lots of levers as you work through even any individual project. I wouldn't have even thought about that on the face. Obviously, currency fluctuation has got to be a tough thing to mitigate.

Andy Herscowitz
Yeah, I mean, the more they think about it, if you finance a power project and it's in dollars, and if the dollar depreciates 100% against the local currency 15 years from now, who pays for that? It's going to be the end user, because the tariff for that power is gonna have to go up in order to pay off the loan. We want to make sure, as much as we can, that we're not making a country less competitive by the terms of our lending.

Michael Crabb
Really interesting. And it's funny, ESG comes up a lot on this podcast and obviously in the energy community, but it's clear. I mean, there's no better ESG mandate than nation development, right? You guys were kind of the first it's pretty cool to hear about. Well, I know we're running a little bit low on time. I wanted to give you a chance, anything that we didn't discuss, or that you'd like to tell our listeners about, or anything else that you'd like to mention here?

Andy Herscowitz
I'm just really excited about the work that DFC is doing. We have an incredible team. We're excited about the Build Back Better World initiative that the Biden-Harris administration has launched in coordination with the G7. That's going to have a heavy focus on infrastructure, particularly benefiting low income and lower middle income countries. We want to make sure that countries realize that we're here to be a good partner that's thinking through long term, sustainable development, lending on terms that benefits the country, that build local capacity, to make sure that create local jobs, that involve training people on new technologies. This US model, along with the other G7 partners, really creates a great alternative to what's out there, because we're really thinking through, not just what's good for us, but what's good for everyone in the international community, to make sure that we've got strong, stable trading partners over a long period of time. Really excited about implementing Build Back Better World.

Michael Crabb
Awesome. Andy, thanks so much for your time today. Couldn't have imagined a better guest. Looking forward to seeing all the great things that you guys build in the future.

Andy Herscowitz
Great, thanks so much.