The M10 industrial park looks much like the warehouses and fulfillment centers lining highways across America. A sprawling complex studded with loading bays, it offers local businesses space to conduct manufacturing, logistics, and technological operations.
But unlike most industrial parks, M10—which opened in 2024 in Lviv, Ukraine—was built as an economic lifeline for a country in crisis. For Ukraine, a major exporter of agricultural products long known as “the breadbasket of Europe,” Russia’s 2022 invasion has been an economic disaster as well as a political and humanitarian one. In particular, Russian attacks on Ukraine’s seaports have disrupted trade routes and hindered the country from doing business with the outside world. M10’s builders and backers hope that a modern, flexible space located less than 40 miles from the Polish border will promote land-based trade routes and provide a boost for Ukrainian companies seeking to work with the European Union.
Projects like M10 are important for ensuring Ukraine’s survival and eventual recovery—but because investing in a war zone is inherently risky, they’re also difficult to finance. To make the project possible, the Cypriot investors behind M10 relied on specialized insurance provided by the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), part of the World Bank Group. MIGA’s risk guarantee offerings encourage foreign direct investment in places where it might not happen organically, such as developing countries and regions facing or recovering from conflict.
There has been a shift from, ‘What’s MIGA?’ to ‘Work with MIGA; don’t do it on your own.’
M10 owes its construction in part to Laura Alonzo ’96, who helped make possible the guarantee financing for the industrial park in her role as co-head of partnerships at MIGA. The project exemplifies Alonzo’s decades of work catalyzing private investment and demonstrating the power of a MIGA guarantee to the donor countries that provide the institution’s capital. She often acts as a behind-the-scenes matchmaker across sectors, connecting investors, governments, and financial institutions to execute ambitious projects that hinge on cooperation.
“Standing up the partnerships function within MIGA has given us a platform to expand our reach,” Alonzo says. “There has been a shift from, ‘What’s MIGA?’ to ‘Work with MIGA; don’t do it on your own.’”
Developing countries in need of economic growth face a catch-22. To create jobs and improve infrastructure, they often want and need foreign investors to take stakes in local enterprises. But foreign investors are understandably wary of getting involved because of the very challenges developing countries seek to address through economic growth—for example, regime change, war, or restrictions on currency exchange.
The youngest organization within the World Bank Group, MIGA aims to upend that bedeviling cycle. Through support from World Bank member countries, MIGA offers a suite of insurance products that can put private-sector investors’ minds at rest by promising to pay out if a project is derailed by factors outside their control. Today, MIGA’s guarantees support 377 projects around the world, including construction of hotels across Africa, the installation of energy-efficient streetlights in St. Lucia, and infrastructure improvements to Kazakhstan’s national railway company.
MIGA offers “a very niche product,” says Alonzo, who has worked at the agency for over 20 years. But it’s also “a very powerful product, and our clients tend to be repeat clients, because it’s a proven thing.” MIGA’s insurance model allows the agency to punch above its weight, facilitating a large amount of foreign direct investment with a relatively small amount of its own money. This year, MIGA marked a milestone of issuing $100 billion in guarantees across its 38-year history—using just $366 million of paid-in public money. “We grease the wheels,” Alonzo explains. “We make it possible to mobilize the private capital that is needed”—to reduce poverty, promote environmental sustainability, and help countries thrive in the long term.
Alonzo’s upbringing in the Philippines laid the groundwork for her work at MIGA. Her economist father and civil servant mother both followed international development economics closely and passed that interest on to her. In the Philippines of her childhood, the degree and nature of foreign involvement in the economy was a hotly contested political issue, and Alonzo learned to understand the difference between investments that strengthen developing countries and those that extract from them. While studying management engineering at Ateneo de Manila University and navigating her first job at the newly privatized Philippine National Oil Company, Alonzo imagined herself contributing to economic development at an organization close to home, like the Asian Development Bank.
Earning an MBA at Yale SOM set Alonzo on an international path. As a student, she learned about “coopetition”—strategic collaboration among potential competitors—from Barry Nalebuff, who coined the term. After graduating, Alonzo joined the public-sector management consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The timing was fortuitous: post-Soviet states were suddenly privatizing huge swaths of their economies. “My experience was very relevant at the time,” Alonzo says.
While conducting research for one of her projects, she learned about MIGA’s work and was intrigued: the organization’s strategy facilitating foreign direct investment seemed like an elegant answer to the economic and political questions she’d been considering for years. She also appreciated that MIGA requires the projects it underwrites to meet environmental and social standards, combining an understanding of “what incentivizes private companies and the concerns of the public sector.” When a PwC colleague took a job there and asked Alonzo to follow her, she jumped at the opportunity.
Speaking about Hurricane Katrina, the journalist Sheri Fink once observed that “there is a tomorrow after a disaster, and it’s sometimes hard to remember that in the midst of it.” In recent years, Alonzo has focused on planning for those “tomorrows” by soliciting donations for MIGA’s trust funds, an offering through which the institution promotes strategic priorities including investment in war-torn and post-conflict regions.
The exceptionally high risks of investing in such areas make MIGA’s standard insurance products untenable; in order to account for the likelihood of having to pay out a policy, the organization would have to charge premiums at rates that are unappealing to investors. Supported by contributions from donor countries, trust funds allow MIGA to keep its premiums at more reasonable levels. This boost means foreign investors aren’t deterred from worthy projects when countries are most fragile.
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, for example, MIGA staff knew right away that a special fund would be needed to keep Ukraine’s private sector afloat. Alonzo and her colleagues worked diligently to convince countries around the world to contribute—a difficult task when most governments wanted to focus on humanitarian or defense concerns.
“It was hard,” she says. In explaining the potential of a trust fund contribution, Alonzo relied on a “bang for your buck” explanation. A dollar donation toward risk guarantees, she argued, can translate to four or five dollars of private capital investment that will provide ongoing employment and stability. That line of argument convinced Japan to make the first Ukraine trust fund contribution; Belgium, the UK, Norway, and the U.S. followed.
In other cases, trust funds can provide access to MIGA guarantees to entities that aren’t World Bank members. The West Bank and Gaza Investment Guarantee Trust Fund supports a small slate of projects in the Palestinian territories, including a date farm in the West Bank and a solar power facility in Gaza that are expected to provide more than 1,000 jobs in the region. Alonzo hopes the fund will play a far greater role in the future. Once it becomes possible to “turn to recovery and reconstruction,” she says, “partnerships will become even more important.”
Alongside trust funds, MIGA has also relied on partnerships with other institutions to help conflict-afflicted countries. On M10, for example, MIGA worked closely with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which invested $25 million in the project. Multilateral development banks like the EBRD and the World Bank can sometimes feel like competitors, Alonzo says. But in this case, MIGA and EBRD practiced the “coopetition” she studied at SOM—talking to the project sponsors jointly, collaborating on due diligence research, and comparing notes.
The work of building relationships and harmonizing bureaucratic operations across global institutions can seem slow or invisible. But Alonzo has embraced quiet leadership as a source of power. “What I do is all behind the scenes,” Alonzo says. “I’m not the one getting on stage [to announce a big project], but I am helping create those opportunities.”
The emphasis on cooperation Alonzo has cultivated throughout her career recently culminated in one of the largest shifts she’s seen at MIGA. In 2024, the World Bank brought all of its risk guarantee offerings, which had previously been spread out across different units, under one roof at MIGA. Combining MIGA’s risk guarantee products with those offered by the broader World Bank and the International Finance Corporation “creates a whole new proposition for what we can do for our countries’ benefit.”
If you support enterprises that are financially sustainable but also deliver a development impact, that’s so much better.
For example, a new MIGA unit devoted to innovation has devised a way for countries to refinance their sovereign debt with support from MIGA guarantees, reducing their monthly debt service payments. In return for MIGA’s assistance securing these more advantageous loans, countries must promise to invest some of their savings in particular policy areas.
Côte d’Ivoire was the first country to take advantage of this “debt for development” approach. Thanks to its newly refinanced debt, the country is expected to invest about $380 million over five years into education programs—to the benefit of some 30,000 students.
Alonzo spent years setting the stage for this kind of collaboration. “You slowly start to show each other your information,” she says. “Did your due diligence come up with the same findings as ours did? Now this cooperation has matured to a point where we’re discussing how to enter into mutual reliance. And it’s necessary, because the scale at which everything needs to be done exceeds the existing capacity.”
Innovative solutions like these, she says, are essential at a time when wealthy countries are slashing foreign-aid budgets while poorer ones are no less in need. Government subsidies can dry up, “but if you support enterprises that are financially sustainable but also deliver a development impact, then that’s so much better,” she says.
Investing in robust infrastructure and healthy businesses that keep people employed, Alonzo says, creates a virtuous cycle of additional investment and a healthier economy with less reliance on MIGA’s services. The ultimate sign of success in any country, she says, “is if you’re not needed there long-term.”
“The Yale School of Management is the graduate business school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut.”
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