The first deal for the International Finance Facility for Immunization has priced. Iffim is an international development funding project supported by the governments of the UK, France, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Spain, South Africa and Brazil and by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It uses these donor sponsors’ future commitments to front load aid to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi) which is targeting 500 million children in the world’s poorest countries.
As a result of this innovative use of the capital markets Gavi will be able to put in place long-term plans. The Iffim programme is $4 billion in total. Goldman Sachs, which worked on structuring the deal for two years on a pro bono basis, did the deal alongside Deutsche Bank. Others working for free included lawyers from Slaughter and May, Linklaters and Richard Butler.
The inaugural $1 billion five-year bond, which printed at a 31 basis points spread over treasuries, just a few points wider than other supranational borrowers. (See Securitization: A steadier stream of health initiatives, October 2005 and IFFIm: a supra new borrower?, September 2006 for more detail on the Iffim concept.)