Orlando Ferreira tells a life story that’s captivating without a trace of self-importance. His father left home at 15. The school in his rural Paraguayan village far from the capital only went as far as the sixth grade, and if you wanted more education, you had to leave. So he did, and left for the capital, 100 kilometers away, and kept on going.

"My father got a scholarship through a program that the U.S. State Department had at the time, so he went to the University of Pittsburgh and completed a master's in public administration, which for him might as well have been Jupiter or Mars," Ferreira said.

His father came home, built a better life, and raised his children on two beliefs above all else: the value of education and the value of hard work. He also modeled the importance of willingness to venture far from home. "Those are the things that changed his life," Ferreira said. "And as a consequence, our family's."
From those beginnings, he is now Chief Finance and Administration Officer of IDB Invest, the private-sector arm of the Inter-American Development Bank, overseeing $14 billion in loans, equity investments, and guarantees this year across 26 Latin American countries stretching from Mexico to Argentina, Chile, and across the Caribbean.

To understand how Ferreira reached this position, it helps to know his roots. Growing up, Paraguay was a different country. "We had 35 years of a ‘strong’ government, to put it mildly," he said. When he was 13, his father decided it was time, and told him, "There is a broader world out there and you need to see it."

At 13, Ferreira left Paraguay to live with his godfather, the Paraguayan ambassador to South Africa, for six months, during a time when apartheid was still in full force. A year after that, he became an 8th grader at Little Flower School, a private Catholic school in Bethesda, Maryland, living with a local family. He said that while it was an adventure for him, he can't imagine what it must have been like for his parents to make that sacrifice, sending him first to Africa and then to the U.S. at that age.

"Those were two very different experiences," he said.

At 17, he had his first job in construction and worked his way through college. He graduated with degrees in economics from the Universidad Nacional de Asunción in Paraguay and a graduate degree in economics from the same university jointly with the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, then later earned a master's in finance from George Washington University.

Paraguay during those years had endured dictatorship and political instability, civil unrest, and then a financial crisis. The systemic collapse of domestic commercial banks wiped out a significant portion of the country's local financial institutions.

"I was in the middle of a huge crisis in the financial sector," he said. "The banks that were in trouble had to go through reorganization processes. I worked with four of them drafting the reorganization plans they had to present to the central bank to get approval so the central bank could give them support to remain afloat. And that's what drew me to the consulting side."

In 1999, he moved to Washington with his wife and young daughters, representing Paraguay on the IDB Group's Board of Executive Directors. His wife left her career at the central bank of Paraguay and built another one here. "I will never thank her enough," Ferreira says. He joined IDB Invest in 2006 as a Senior Advisor, rose through the organization, and ultimately became Chief Finance and Administration Officer, building the institution's sustainable bond funding program to $2.8 billion annually along the way.

His world is a financial niche many aren't familiar with, but maybe we should be. IDB Invest is different from other investment firms in two important ways. First, it is owned by 48 countries, 22 of them non-borrowing developed nations including the United States. Second, its mission. "The one thing you don't have to worry about is the purpose," Ferreira said. "You know exactly why you're coming to work. You're coming to work because you want to improve the lives of millions and millions of people in Latin America and the Caribbean" through private-sector investments.

According to Ferreira, IDB Invest thinks differently from a conventional bank. When the institution finances a hotel in the Caribbean, for example, it sits down with the owners and requires that at least 60 percent of everything the hotel purchases be sourced from local companies. Suddenly the investment ripples out beyond the hotel itself, to the food suppliers, the soap makers, the small businesses that now have a customer they didn't have before. In Paraguay alone, IDB Invest has issued eight local currency bonds, meaning local companies can borrow in their own currency rather than in dollars, protecting them from exchange rate risk.

"Have we achieved our mission? Have we done what we set out to do? Have we helped these companies expand and therefore create more jobs or improve the local economy?" he said. "Those are the questions we ask."

Ferreira also measures the actual social and economic benefits of each project, not just anecdotal results. Did the investment actually work? Did it improve people's lives? In a field where impact is often asserted rather than demonstrated, that accountability matters.

After his father passed away before turning 71, Ferreira wrote a long letter to all the grandchildren, who ranged in age from 7 to 18, each old enough to have known their grandfather. He titled it simply: To You, His Grandchildren. He did not want them to forget what it took. He did not want their identity, their culture, their grandparents' journey to slip away.

"It was tough to write, but so rewarding," he said. "Once in a while, they would ask me again, where's the letter? Can you send it back to us? We want to read it again. I wanted them to really get at least an idea of what it took for our family to end up here, something I would never have imagined."

His mother is still alive and visits for several months each year. He still has family in Paraguay and speaks Guaraní, the indigenous language his grandfather taught him, spoken by most of the country alongside Spanish. Ferreira gets back home once or twice a year for work and sees firsthand what the institution's investments mean in the country where his story began.

"I can't imagine a more solid foundation," he said. "Not just from what my parents did for us, but by their example."