In Sub-Saharan Africa, they can be particularly useful to assist countries with limited project preparation capacities to develop projects that can only attract repayable finance if they are combined with innovative approaches to financing, such as blending grants and loans or using guarantees to reduce the risk perception. Grant finance channelled through these facilities has usually been focused on the first step of project preparation, without necessarily providing support for upstream institutional reforms or downstream implementation activities. These facilities are also seen by some as a channel for helping IFIs prepare projects, which should be one of their core activities and therefore amounts to an implicit subsidy for those IFIs.