It was in January 1968 when the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) released one of its staff members to establish the first regional association of development banks, the Latin American Association of Development Financing Institutions (ALIDE), in Lima, Peru, in collaboration with the Industrial Bank of Peru, which provided office space and support staff to get ALIDE’s operations started. Ricardo Palma Valderrama from Peru became the first Secretary General of ALIDE and Rubens Vaz da Costa from Brazil, a former president of the Bank of the Northeast of Brazil, became its first President. In 1968, the Inter-American Development Bank considered this creation of an association of development banks in its borrowing member countries an item of the highest priority, because it felt that such an association could critically contribute to raising the quality, competency, and capabilities of these institutions, which were receiving large lines of credit (“global loans”) from the IDB for the financing of small and medium sized projects in their countries. This increase in quality of projects would raise the effectiveness of the global loans of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

The decade of the 1960s was also the time when economic and social cost/benefit analysis became a standard practice for the appraisal of projects by development banks, as well as for calculating the expected internal rates of return of projects. The IDB considered it important to create a capability in cost/benefit analysis in each development bank and the new development bank association was to provide training in this field for its members.