Fostering impact investment in developing countries

The paper will present the development of impact investment as an industry and then specifically focus on the ways of fostering such a financial instrument in developing countries. Similar to the venture capital firms supporting innovation in high technology firms, impact investment firms are spurring social innovation in a vast variety of countries. Such a financial instrument might have high potential in developing countries that are facing with many social and environmental problems besides economic ones. Based on the experiences in advanced countries, we will attempt to compare the conditions of advanced and developing countries in terms of building and running impact investment industry. As impact investment is a unique financial institution, we will highlight how developing countries can learn from the experience of advanced countries and develop their own impact investment industry in order to foster their social innovation capability.