The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the US government’s developmental finance arm, mobilizes private capital to simultaneously solve global challenges and advance US foreign policy. This note considers how OPIC helps US businesses unlock emerging and frontier markets and what financing, insurance instruments and mechanisms it uses to achieve this. This note reviews OPIC’s activities to discover how it operates on a self-sustaining basis, at no net cost to US taxpayers. It evaluates how it has enhanced private sector ability to invest in the riskiest environments – such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq and Afghanistan, where most insurers refuse to guarantee – and how the multiplier effect magnifies the impact of the capital it invests.