Annual Report

2011 began with the President’s annual reception for the executive boards of our two alumni associations, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management / Bankakademie Alumni e.V. and Frankfurt School Alumni e.V., at which former Eintracht Frankfurt player Christoph Preuss gave a presentation on “Football as Motivation for Life”.


Christoph Preuss (left) and Prof. Udo Steffens, FS President

Throughout the year, our collaborative work with our alumni associations continued to develop very successfully, driven by regular meetings of the Alumni Steering Committee.

The Friends of Frankfurt School programme launched in November 2010 continued into 2011, with good levels of participation and positive feedback from participants. A series of events was organised, including presentations in Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Hamburg. The first Frankfurt School Summer Party for all Friends of Frankfurt School was hosted by well-known sports commentator Volker Hirth (from Hessischer Rundfunk), and proved to be the highlight of the summer.

Volker Hirth, sports commentator with Hessischer Rundfunk, hosts the Frankfurt School Summer Party

Enjoying the Summer Party

Meanwhile there is plenty of lively interaction in and between the many communities accessible through the FS Friends & Alumni Portal, while the response to the first few events in our new Ladies First – Forum for Women at Frankfurt School series has been enthusiastic, with business speakers addressing topics such as women in management, combining career and family, and other sensitive issues.


“Ladies First” on October 12, 2011 with Simone Haussmann-Post, CEO of Deutsche Bank’s Ruhrgebiet West regional business unit, in charge of 630 employees.

Our alumni seminars for International Health Management graduates, sponsored by DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service), gave FS graduates from Europe, Africa, Asia and Arabic countries an opportunity to exchange news and views.


Former IHM graduates at our alumni seminar in Nairobi

Once again, there was a gratifying level of response to our 2011 graduate surveys, recently redesigned in consultation with CHE Consult. 90% of the respondents from our Master programmes and 81% of our Bachelor graduates would recommend a degree course at Frankfurt School to others.

Our continuing education courses for bank employees seeking to qualify as banking specialists, banking administrators and management specialists continue to be one of Frankfurt School’s core business activities. Despite the steadily rising number of competing offerings, our student numbers have remained more or less constant. In autumn 2011, we added a new option to our banking specialist course – an in-house qualification enabling students to graduate as a “Bankfachwirt/in (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management)”. The new option includes a highly practical Customer Support module. In order to be able to offer the option of state-subsidised student loans to students on these courses, Frankfurt School successfully applied to the Gesellschaft der Deutschen Wirtschaft zur Förderung und Zertifizierung von Qualitätssicherungssystemen in der Beruflichen Bildung mbH (Certqua) for certification of our quality assurance systems. After an extensive audit, Frankfurt School was formally certified as a national supplier of continuing professional education.

Students who graduate from our advanced courses in banking administration and management studies now have some very attractive options for continuing their studies both inside and outside Frankfurt School. Banking administrators, for example, can now choose to enrol in a special, three-semester version of our Bachelor of Management and Financial Markets degree course, and once they have completed their management studies, qualified banking administrators can apply to do an Executive Master degree course, for example a Master of Risk Management and Regulation or an Executive MBA. For school and college leavers, professional programmes of this kind represent an attractive and flexible alternative to a full-time Bachelor degree course.

To help qualified banking administrators become more competitive on the international stage, another International Executive Week was arranged in 2011. The event took place in Shanghai, with Dr. Horst Löchel as the academic organiser. As Professor of Economics, Dr. Löchel worked for Frankfurt School in Shanghai between 2003 and 2011, at, for example, CEIBS (China Europe International Business School), where he continues to work as Visiting Professor of Economics. In a series of case studies, excursions and talks by experts, various topical issues of relevance to the future of China’s banking market were presented and discussed.


Taking part in International Executive Week at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai

Meet Frankfurt School! 2011

2011’s “Meet Frankfurt School!” careers fair – third in this successful series – was launched by Professor Steffens’s opening address, delivered in the FS foyer. Thanks to the efforts of our Career Services team, an even larger number of businesses took part, including the management consultancy firms so popular with students. The Big Four – KPMG, PWC, E&Y and Deloitte – were also represented. At most of the stands, students and graduates found themselves speaking to Frankfurt School alumni who were able to give them personal insights into recruitment options, corporate culture and career prospects. The event also encouraged students to start building their own professional networks. A large number of students took advantage of the many opportunities to make first contact and consolidate existing relationships.

Discussing careers at “Meet Frankfurt School”

New Horizons@FS

Our Career Services team recently launched a series of workshops on soft skills for managers, New Horizons@FS. Thanks to the hard work of our Fundraising Manager, the New Horizons@FS series is currently sponsored by Citi Foundation. The workshops are intended to prepare students for the key skills – quite apart from high standards of academic excellence – that modern businesses hope to find in applicant profiles. From business etiquette to assessment centre training by way of job application training, debating, conflict management and brainteasers, students on Bachelor and Master degree courses are given a thorough grounding in often neglected skills that will increase their corporate employability.

Career Services presentations and workshops

The number and quality of workshops organised in 2011 both rose once again. The relevance of our various courses focusing on finance means that Frankfurt School and FS students have become very attractive to international banks. Career Services receive numerous requests for one-off recruitment events that include a preliminary shortlisting of candidates. Among the companies that visited the campus in 2011 were A.T.Kearney, Citigroup Global Markets, Accenture, Jefferies, Deutsche Bank Inhouse Consulting, The Boston Consulting Group, Roland Berger, Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital.

Jobs Board

Posting job offers on Frankfurt School’s in-house Jobs Board is free of charge, and companies in a wide variety of sectors take advantage of this to make direct contact with future employees. At any given moment there are – on average – ca. 400 job offers posted online, around a third of them advertising full-time positions. The remaining job ads are directed at students looking for internships, student employment or other temporary work. Job offers often represent the first contact our Career Services team has with a company, giving them an opportunity to build a relationship with businesses interested in closer ties with Frankfurt School.

Mentoring

2011 also saw the launch of another round of our FS Mentoring programme for Bachelor students. This programme is becoming steadily more popular and the number of students applying for tandem partners from among our many alumni is increasing from one year to the next.

Ladies First

Since its first inception, the series of events featured in our Ladies First – Forum for Women has evolved a specific format, moderated by our Career Services team and Fundraising & Alumni Manager. Female students and alumnae benefit from direct contact with women working in senior management positions who are prepared to share their personal experiences with other women.

FS Friends & Alumni Portal

Since 2011 our Career Services team has been promoting and managing all the events they organise through the FS Friends & Alumni Portal. For Career Services, the portal acts as a modern medium that is popular with its target audience, meaning that the many different types of event on offer can be presented attractively to students and alumni.

ConCap Connective Capital is a Frankfurt School subsidiary that in addition to managing the FinAcc Fund (launched in 2010), also manages Germany’s first microfinance fund (launched in October 2011). Set up as a mutual fund under German law, the new product is ideal for private and institutional investors looking to invest in microfinance institutions in developing countries. The fund provides these institutions with funding on condition that they issue microloans to individuals who would otherwise have no access to financial services, giving these individuals the opportunity to alleviate their poverty by their own efforts – thus helping them to help themselves. By helping to reduce poverty, the fund is producing a positive social return as well as an attractive financial return.

ConCap is also responsible for the Frankfurter Fund for Entrepreneurs underwritten by Frankfurt’s business development agency. This enables the City of Frankfurt to support business startups and new businesses that need loans in the EUR 2,500-50,000 range. The Frankfurt Fund for Entrepreneurs guarantees 80% of each new business loan, and this support, combined with advisory support by ConCap, has helped to boost new business startups in Frankfurt. The Fund’s motto is “Swift, simple, non-bureaucratic”. To date, over 30 projects have been recommended for guaranteed loans averaging ca. EUR 26,800 each.

Efiport, another Frankfurt School subsidiary , designs and manages e-learning programmes. Last year the company launched a major migration project for a long-standing client, NIBE-SVV. Market leader in the Netherlands, this further training institution is a financial academy that specialises in banking and insurance, offering a broad range of widely varied courses from distance learning to seminars through to professional in-house training. The aim of the migration –from the academy’s existing system to efiport AG’s own Campus & Learning Management system (CLM) – is to make the most of all the CLM core functions. These include administrative processes such as managing personal data (including customer relationship management [CRM] functions), organising classroom teaching, managing online bookings for distance learning, generating estimates and invoices, interfacing with the academy’s accounting system and using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interfaces to display selected content from CLM on the academy’s website.

NIBE-SVV uses CLM to manage over 50,000 students every year. This year CLM will be supporting some 110,000 users. CLM is also used to process over 360,000 online tests each year, and provides help and support to around 3,500 students each month.

Following a proposal by Frankfurt School, EFPA Deutschland e.V. was set up in November 2010. Stalwart efforts by all concerned saw the company establish itself successfully as the association’s German arm in 2011. This means the association’s highly successful set of standard European qualifications for financial advisors working in the upscale private-client segment are now available in Germany, too.

The European Financial Planning Association (EFPA) is a European umbrella organisation that seeks to set and establish high quality standards for financial advisors. EFPA has developed standards covering training and further training as well as ethics, and audits compliance with these standards with a view to protecting the interests of consumers receiving financial advice. The German affiliate is helping to introduce the association’s European Financial Advisor (EFA) degree in Germany. More than 12,000 graduates from 15 European countries have already been awarded this qualification.


Frankfurt School’s Financial Consultant degree course entitles graduates to use the title “European Financial Advisor”. Here are our first 24 graduates!

EFPA has accredited Frankfurt School’s Financial Consultant degree course as suitable for training EFA consultants, meaning that graduates are entitled to apply for an EFA licence. Frankfurt School is thus taking part in a European initiative that precisely meets the current need for advanced private banking qualifications. Today’s financial advisors no longer insist on offering their clients a complete financial planning service: instead, they tend to focus on providing in-depth advice on individual, often specialised issues while at the same time not losing sight of the bigger picture. The Financial Consultant programme covers precisely this training requirement and is rapidly becoming a private banking benchmark.

Quite independently, Frankfurt School’s Financial Consultant and Financial Planner programmes were both reaccredited by Germany’s Financial Planning Standards Board Deutschland (FPSB) e.V., setting yet another quality seal on our specialist programmes and clearly indicating that graduates from these programmes are fully qualified as Certified Financial Planners (CFP) as recognised by FPSB Deutschland e.V.

Thinking outside the box

Frankfurt School views itself as a business school that teaches all general management topics, across all industries and all kinds of organisations. The ongoing development of Frankfurt School’s Executive Education programmes under the wing of the Corporate Programmes & Services unit made impressive progress during 2011. Along with our International Programmes, the unit’s Competence Centre in Management, Leadership & Strategy set new standards in the year under review.

The main focus of our Executive Education efforts is on building understanding of processes of change that stimulate the personal development of managers, employees and specialists alike, thereby enabling the organisation as a whole to grow. Using a variety of methods, including consultancy sessions, training courses and private coaching sessions for individual managers, our experts demonstrate, explain and implement innovative approaches for dealing with change that can be applied successfully and sustainably in business environments.

Frankfurt School’s international involvement in executive education also intensified in 2011. In a series of conferences and seminars, our Executive Education team raised market awareness of the importance of familiarising oneself with the work of other business units, and of understanding complex market relationships and other influential factors. The team also designed and organised individual seminars and training events for senior managers and delegations from the Bank of Chongqing and Zhejiang Tailong Commercial Bank.


Delegates from the Bank of Chongqing attend a seminar


Staff from Zhejiang Tailong Commercial Bank and Frankfurt School in a group photo

As a business school, Frankfurt School is ideally placed to train top managers and executives at national and international level, and to help them streamline their business processes.

The faculty also continued to grow in 2011: a total of six new academic staff (four professors, one junior professor and one lecturer) were appointed. In June, we set up our Accounting Department, rounding out our departmental structure very nicely. The following professors report to Head of Department Professor Jörg R. Werner: Professor Michael Grüning (Accounting & Management Control), Professor Luise Hölscher (Accounting & Taxation ), Professor Yuping Jia (Junior Professor of Accounting) and Professor Hermann A. Wagner (Honorary Professor of Financial Management).

Prof. Jörg R. Werner	Prof. Michael Grüning	Prof. Luise Hölscher	Prof. Yuping Jia	Prof. Hermann A. Wagner

The Accounting Department’s current research efforts are focused on the use of empirical, quantitative and experimental methodologies to measure the performance of businesses and their business units, the impact of corporate disclosure, issues of corporate governance, the factors that determine “accounting quality” and the regulation of financial reporting and auditing.

Following institutional accreditation by the German Science Council in 2010, Frankfurt School is currently striving to achieve international accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) with the aim of further enhancing the university’s visibility and reputation, especially outside Germany. Frankfurt School has been “AACSB-eligible” since early 2011 – that is, authorised to make an official application for actual accreditation. Since then our accreditation team has concentrated on driving the process forward with constructively critical support from our mentor Richard Durand, former Dean of Kogod School of Business (American University, Washington D.C.). In December 2011 the team made another major step forward with the submission of our “Standards Alignment Plan”. The next step is to implement the plan in the course of 2012.

Frankfurt School regards AACSB accreditation as an opportunity to take a self-critical look at the university’s activities in the academic sphere. This applies both to teaching, where it is clearly important to continue to develop Frankfurt School’s existing strengths, but also to our research, certain aspects of which still need some specific refinement.

Academic programmes and students

Of the many activities we engaged in last year, two in particular should be mentioned: in autumn of 2011 we launched our “Intensive Track” Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration. Although this high-intensity, full-time degree course has a uniquely specialised Finance component, it can still be completed in six rather than seven semesters.

And in May 2011, Frankfurt School students organised the latest Frankfurt School Conference on the theme of “My Future. In Debt. Facing the Biggest Bill in History”. Among the many high-quality speakers were Philipp Holzer, Deputy Head of Goldman Sachs, Joe Kaeser, CFO of Siemens, and Wolfgang Kirsch, CEO of DZ Bank.

Debating at FS Conference	The audience listening attentively

Our representative office in Brazil is housed in the Chamber of Commerce building in Sao Paulo.

As a direct result of our responsiveness, it has become clear that the specialists in charge of our Competence Centres are increasingly perceived as valuable contacts and advisors by our clients. Thus over a period of just ten months we successfully trained some 1,000 customer relationship managers for a major bank. In addition to requests for training in finance and sales, the Department also received an increasing number of inquiries and follow-up orders relating to general management, leadership and communication. We also won a number of major projects by producing detailed training needs analyses during the bidding and design phases preceding these projects.

Thanks to the impressive commitment of our FP&S staff, Frankfurt School was able to open an office in Sao Paulo in Brazil at year-end 2011. This means the university is now represented in Latin America as well as Asia and Africa – another example of how the Corporate Programmes & Services department is helping to market, enhance the value and raise the visibility of the Frankfurt School brand worldwide.

Education Management

2011 saw some big changes: 1,000 training days and 3,500 trainees in 2010 became 5,000 training days and 5,000 trainees in 2011 – and 43 staff became 58! The Education Management unit experienced steady growth throughout 2011, both in terms of training days and staff, but also in terms of acquiring new clients and presenting a broader range of offerings.

The success of our Education Management unit is based on the quality of our training materials and the skills of our staff. Professional responsibility is a top priority, with cutting-edge information delivered in an optimised standard format. In 2011 we also focused on ensuring that all coaches and instructors were fully trained and certified. A number of different tools were used, including suggestopaedia and NLP, as well as a solid grounding in rhetoric and how to deal with seminar participants – in short, ideal training for everyday business life.

Frankfurt School’s portfolio is rapidly growing to encompass areas of activity outside the finance and banking industry. Our Education Management unit contributed to this expansion by bringing two new products to market: ADA Online for budding educators, and Online Gap Analysis for office communication staff. These are just two of the many ideas produced by the 58 creative minds now working in Education Management.

Public recognition and first assessments of research work are based on the peer-reviewed journals in which the research results are published, weighted according to the academic status of the media in which they appear. We use this same approach when assessing our own work. By these criteria, Frankfurt School performed well in 2011, with a comprehensive list of publications in authoritative, industry-leading journals such as Applied Economics, Applied Financial Economics, European Accounting Review, European Journal of Operational Research, Health Care Management Science, Quantitative Finance, Review of Derivatives Research and Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsrecht.

While publications and the tangible results of applied research are important for business schools, involvement in research also has a deeper significance, albeit one that is easy to overlook. Our systematic focus on research at Frankfurt School means that we are more aware than ever of the importance of the Classical maxim omne agens agendo perficitur, whereby an active being – in this case, human being – perfects himself or herself by the very process of acting. Thus the ability to carry out meaningful research is only developed and maintained by the act of engaging in research. Like a well-trained muscle, an actively exercised research ability can be applied to many different tasks.

The ability of scientists and academics to contribute to solving problems is only partially based on the application of book learning. More important is a general ability to move towards solutions through independent analysis of a problem’s root causes. Because life is all about problem-solving, a good research practitioner is especially well-prepared to approach practical life problems in a rational, scientifically enlightened manner, systematically zeroing in on possible solutions. Thus research-driven business schools become places where important steps are made towards gaining a more scientific understanding of human activities, and where such insights are further developed by the virtuous circle of research and education.

The Frankfurt School doctoral programme was thoroughly revised and restructured in 2011, so that it now reflects Frankfurt School’s determination to further develop and refine our focus on research: the programme now boasts seven fully funded scholarship holders and seven more doctoral candidates. This does not mean, however, that Frankfurt School will cease to cultivate the university’s existing strengths in practical, real-world research. What it does mean is that the university will apply the impressive research abilities already present in the faculty in a systematic fashion that also embraces and encourages the efforts of young, upcoming researchers.

To give just one typical example based on Frankfurt School’s traditional core competencies: a research project by Professor Dominik Georgi financed by FIRM (Frankfurt Institute of Risk Management) in collaboration with Professor Roman Inderst at Frankfurt’s Goethe University and Konstantin Lange, one of Frankfurt School’s doctoral candidates, is exploring the impact of financial advice by banks on bank clients’ financial decisions, benefits and profitability. Other projects similarly reflect the growing research focus at Frankfurt School, which seeks to re-examine the most basic principles and tenets.

Frankfurt School Verlag, another Frankfurt School subsidiary, can look back on a very successful 2011. During the year we further consolidated and developed our existing formats, and also took on more staff.

Banking & Finance

Our core publishing focus is banking and finance, and in 2011 we continued to pursue our successful “by professionals for professionals” approach, both in terms of the books we published and the dozen or so specialist conferences we organised. A number of events, such as our NPL Forum, have become important industry events.

We made especially satisfying progress in another key area of activity, banking regulation, bringing no less than three new titles to market. The launch of Bankenaufsicht nach der Finanzmarktkrise (Banking supervision after the financial market crisis) at the Frankfurt Book Fair attracted a top-class audience.

Green Finance

Frankfurt School Verlag also made very satisfactory progress in another key area of activity: GREEN FINANCE. We organised a special event to launch the 1200-page book Finanzierung Erneuerbarer Energien (Financing Renewable Energies) at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2011. The book swiftly established itself as a standard reference work – the first edition was sold out in the space of a few months. Two specialist conferences in our Renewable Energy Finance and Sustainable Financial Investment series were organised in 2011; follow-on events in the series are scheduled for 2012. Finally, our new “DESERTEC Briefings” series has met with an enthusiastic reception, regularly attracting large numbers of high-profile media representatives to Frankfurt.

Japan

The publishing house also broke new ground by hosting a specialist conference on Japan’s capital market, reflecting our ambition to organise events that cover international financial centres as well as emerging economies.

Frankfurt School of Finance & Management successfully participated in the new “Deutschlandstipendium” programme organised by the German government. Our involvement in this scholarship programme meant we could award five scholarships to students enrolled on academic courses for the 2011-12 academic year (in line with our quota entitlement). The aim of this national scholarship programme is to attract private funding that is then “fund-matched” by the German government. We would like to thank all our sponsors, including Dr. Jutta Buscha-Hagenmüller, Dr. Gertrud Traud, Dr. Lutz R. Raettig, Professor Dr. Udo Steffens and Frankfurt School Alumni e.V. The latter also awarded two travel scholarships to FS students in 2011. The Alumni association also declared that it is prepared to fund one “Deutschlandstipendium” each year for as long as the Federal Government continues to support the programme.

Once again, the DAAD Matching Funds scheme also helped a number of students to finance their studies thanks to a generous donation to the Frankfurt School Foundation by Interessengemeinschaft Frankfurter Kreditinstitute GmbH (IFK), an interest group composed of Frankfurt-based banks.

We would also like to thank Citi Foundation for once again providing funds in support of our 2011 series of New Horizons@FS workshops. The series is open to all students on Bachelor and Master programmes, and is intended to increase employability by building and/or enhancing personal and social skills.


Fine Dining workshop (part of the New Horizons series)

In honour of the memory of our founder, Professor Dr. Karl Friedrich Hagenmüller, the Karl Friedrich Hagenmüller Room on the first floor of Frankfurt School now houses all the most interesting volumes from his working library. His widow, Dr. Buscha-Hagenmüller, joined us for the academic awards ceremony in St. Paul’s church on May 20, 2011, at which the Hagenmüller Prize was also awarded.


In commemoration of our founder his portrait and part of his working library are now on display in the “Karl Friedrich Hagenmüller Room” on Frankfurt School’s first floor


Katja Naumann is awarded the Prof. Dr. Karl Friedrich Hagenmüller Prize by Prof. Dr. Udo Steffens

During 2011 our International Advisory Services (IAS) unit was asked to advise on over 100 projects around the world. Here are some typical examples of our international activities:

China: shortly after Chinese New Year in 2011, we launched the CCB Small Lending Programme. The aim of the programme, which is financed by KfW, is to support three Chinese banks that are already active in the SME (small and medium enterprises) segment by providing them with specialist advice on market penetration and product development, as well as continuing education programmes.

Tajikistan: once again, key milestones were achieved during the second phase of the EU-funded EBRD TAFF (European Bank for Reconstruction & Development Tajik Agricultural Finance Framework) project. A specially developed, highly innovative funding model based on a combination of agronomic and financial calculations was used to issue more than 12,000 loans for seasonal finance to local farmers, as well as medium-term loans totalling around USD 38 million.

Mirukhmadov Nurmahmad, who runs the Nurmahmad orchard, with adviser Usmonkul Boturov

Turkey: IAS advisory mandates in Turkey represent one of our main activity streams and are extremely varied. One example is the SME financing facility funded by the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction & Development) for banks in rural areas and border regions. Another example is the Turkey Sustainable Energy Finance Facility: in this case, EBRD engaged IAS to help banks extend their portfolios by taking on more green finance products.


EBRD borrower in Turkey

Egypt, Morocco and Jordan: one of the major causes of the Arab Spring was above-average youth unemployment, exacerbated by lack of access to good-quality higher education. On behalf of KfW, IAS developed survey-based tools for helping students in Egypt, Morocco and Jordan to find funding for degree courses that match job market demand.

Democratic Republic of Congo: IAS is the fund manager of the Fonds de Promotion de Microfinance, which aims to make it easier for SMEs to access financial services.

Guatemala: with the aim protecting users of financial services – in particular consumers in disadvantaged ethnic groups – the banking supervisory authority in Guatemala asked IAS for advice on setting up a “Financial Education Programme”.

Africa and the Pacific region: IAS was chosen by the European Investment Bank to provide advisory services to microfinance institutions in which the bank’s Rural Impulse Fund II has invested. With a total volume of EUR 97 million, Rural Impulse Fund II is the largest fund for providing financial support to microfinance institutions in outlying and rural areas of developing countries.

New course available on Development Finance e-learning platform LinkEd: following the success of our first e-learning course, dubbed “Certified Expert in Microfinance for India”, LinkED decided to offer the course to a broader international audience in 2011. 115 managers from small and medium microfinance institutions immediately enrolled on the course.

UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate and Sustainable Energy & Finance

In 2011, we substantially extended the portfolio of projects managed by our Frankfurt School-UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) Collaborating Centre for Climate and Sustainable Energy Finance. The main focus of our activities was on producing market studies, developing products for financial institutions and manufacturers of renewable energy technologies, and training local specialists. Highlights of a busy year include:

User finance: UNEP develops and places microfinance products designed to enable people in threshold and developing economies to buy clean-energy products such as solar panels. The electricity grids in many developing countries are often overloaded, resulting in frequent power cuts. For many users “renewables” are an attractive alternative: they also help to boost local economies.


Solar panel on a roof in Nepal

Fund management: through the Climate Finance Innovation Facility, UNEP and Frankfurt School’s IAS unit help financial institutions in developing countries to design innovative financial products aimed specifically at manufacturers and buyers of renewable energy technologies.

Seed Capital Support Facility: while most developing countries are not short of entrepreneurs with ideas for innovative ways to use renewable energies, they are usually short of capital. UNEP/IAS assists both potential entrepreneurs and providers of seed capital by providing co-financing and the technical expertise required to evaluate new business ideas.

Bolivia: Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) is an initiative for the protection and sustainable cultivation of forests with the aim of preserving natural carbon storage. KfW recently commissioned the UNEP Centre to devise a financial structure that will reduce deforestation and encourage a holistic approach to forest management in Bolivia.


Virgin rainforest in Bolivia

Publication of Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investments in July 2011: published in collaboration with Bloomberg New Energy, our Global Trends report showed that investment in renewable energies reached record levels in 2010, with a total investment volume of USD 211 million. The detailed analysis of current trends in finance for renewable energies showed that for the first time, developing countries are investing more in these technologies than wealthier countries in the Western world.


Cover of Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investments 2011

17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change: another highlight of 2011 was the opportunity for a number of UNEP/IAS staff to attend COP17 in Durban. Our delegates introduced the Centre and described how our work is contributing to the National Climate Finance Support Programme.


Project Manager Carola Menzel at one of the National Climate Finance Support Programme workshops organised in Durban by the FS-UNEP Collaborating Centre.


The UNEP/IAS team attending the Climate Summit in Durban, South Africa

New partner universities

2011 saw a further increase in the number of partner universities in Frankfurt School’s international network, including the University of the West Indies in Barbados, the German-Jordanian University in Amman, Jordan, and the Regional University of Blumenau (FURB) in Brazil. We also extended our European network to include two new partner universities in Ireland: Dublin Business School and Griffith College (also in Dublin).

Summer School

For the first time, we organised a summer school on “Development Finance” in 2011. 15 students from partner universities in Australia, China, Colombia, Russia and Spain spent two weeks attending lectures, a conference and workshops on this theme. Excursions to organisations such as the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, as well as a visit to the European Central Bank, rounded off a varied programme.


Students attending our first summer school on Development Finance