Financial assistance is crucial to ensure that feasibility studies move from paper to reality. In addition, because financing opportunities and the most appropriate tax incentives for each case are analyzed in a targeted way, it is possible to reduce the return-on-investment period of projects to 3–4 years.

In Colombia, despite the availability and dissemination of incentives and financing mechanisms, there is still limited awareness of the support options for projects related to resource efficiency and cleaner production (RECP) in industry. For this reason, the programme’s financial area carried out an analysis and local contextualization of the Access to Finance (A2F) tool created in GEIPP South Africa, identifying 109 opportunities for Colombia, which were later prioritized and reduced to 81. These were shared with the companies and parks participating in the programme.

To date, more than 30 advisory engagements have been provided to companies and parks with the aim of filtering and prioritizing their financing and incentive opportunities, based on the characteristics of the A2F tool. It is expected that, by the end of 2023, a total of 17 companies that carried out feasibility studies during the second half of 2022 will also be able to move forward in this process.

In parallel, and according to the needs identified in the assisted companies, it became necessary to make progress in three areas: consolidating a sustainability culture, building contact networks with financial institutions, and providing supporting financial services.

When initiating advisory work to prioritize financing options in companies and parks, it was found that the GEIPP Programme needed to act as an intermediary with financial institutions to facilitate access to resources. In this process, results have gone beyond the initial objective of facilitating financing: over time, the networking process has helped position the GEIPP Programme at the national level and create support networks, which has led to the development of joint work agendas with the 14 financing institutions—both national and international—that have been engaged to date.