What does "endorsed" mean (international finance?)

Factual Questions
1

It seems to be something somewhere between pledging an amount and paying an amount — or perhaps signing off on a particular project that is tapping into pledged funds. Here is a sentence I’m trying to make sense of:

This is based on a document from a document from a draft report from The World Bank. The report itself isn’t online (that I can find), but the relevant bit is:

[quote]
Current funding
During the reporting period, 12 countries have pledged a combined $6.2 billion to the (CIF)—$5 billion to the CTF and $1.2 billion to the SCF.

What’s happening
Clean Technology Fund
In the past year, the CTF has endorsed three investment programs that support wind power projects, rapid bus transit and light rail, energy efficiency schemes, and a low-carbon financial intermediary project. Investment Plans are under preparation in 10 more countries, and the CTF has a target of endorsing 15-20 Investment Plans by the end of fiscal year 2010.

Endorsed Investment Plans:[ul]
[li]Egypt (CTF: $300 million; leverages $1.9 billion).[/li][li]Mexico (CTF:$500 million; leverages $6.2 billion).[/li][li]Turkey (CTF: $250 million; leverages $2.1 billion).[/ul][/li][/quote]

… so how is ‘endorsed’ being used? I need to make the quoted sentence above intelligible to the average reader, and if I’m not sure what it says, I can’t do much to make it approachable.

Thanks,

Rhythm

(Oh, remember this is GQ, and anything related to climate change, climate change finance, etc., should go in a separate thread.)

2

It means to complete the transfer process. Most often seen in International Trade. Lets say I contract to sell you 1000 tonnes of crude. The crude is shipped to you, but the relevent documents, including the Bill of Lading are often sent to you seperatly. In many cases the nature of the contract means that the property is transferred to you at the time when the documents are transferred to you (regardless of whether you have taken delivery or paid). The perils of that are obvious, so it is often the case that in Bills of Lading where the space for the name of the consignee is, it is filled instead of the consignee’s name, with the term “To Order”. This means that I am reseving the title in property until payment is receieved, and than I will transfer it to you by endorsement (this is done usually by indicating at the back of the Bill of Lading).