Project Description
Emerging market investors are hampered by the lack of reliable ESG data about project and company risks and the analytical capacity to identify these ESG issues. The data needed to address this gap generally exists publicly via news articles, sustainability reports, and bond prospectuses. However, these text sources are hard to compare and require technical expertise to analyze comprehensively.
MALENA is an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered analytics platform and virtual analyst created by IFC to increase analytical capacity to assess ESG risks. MALENA is a natural language processing algorithm and is trained using IFC’s historical ESG, climate, and gender datasets to extract meaningful insights from text data and thereby increase productivity and build investor confidence. Additionally, MALENA leverages the expertise of IFC’s ESG experts through the use of active learning to support model training and performance.
The project activities comprise:
1) At the firm level, providing access to MALENA, as well as guidance and training to assist investors in conducting ESG analysis of pipeline and portfolio investments, rapidly and at scale;
2) At the sector level, promoting the use of impact and ESG analytics through MALENA.