Get the latest African news, updates, and much more only on the NPR Africa section. Also top stories from business, politics, health, science, technology, music, arts, and culture. Crucial ingredients are still missing from the impact landscape, such as the institutional infrastructure needed to support the marketplace. NPR delivers breaking national and world news. These and other first movers have laid the pathway for the more than 40 locally originated funds now headquartered in the region.ĭespite this momentum, collective action is needed by governments, development finance institutions, and large companies to provide funding and create the right incentives for impact investing. ET, with hosts Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Scott Simon. ET, with hosts Rachel Martin, Noel King and Steve Inskeep. The three biggest stories of the day, with reporting and analysis from NPR News in 10 minutes. Adobe Capital followed in 2011, launched out of New Ventures, Mexico’s leading social and environmental accelerator. NPR's Up First is the news you need to start your day. Vox Capital was launched later that year in Brazil, and became the country’s first investment vehicle with a specific mission to alleviate the problems that plagued the country’s education, finance, and health sectors, while at the same time generating financial results. The first was Mexico’s Ignia Fund, which started operations in 2009. While impact investors in Latin America originally came mainly from outside the region, there is an increasing shift toward locally created and developed impact-investment funds.

New reforms are underway to improve the investment climate, and the improvements have not been lost on Argentina’s social entrepreneurs, who are organizing and launching new initiatives, including Njambre (a Spanish term for “swarm”), a new social accelerator that is attracting the attention of international donors and local partners. An economic renaissance has been taking place since market-friendly President Mauricio Macri became president in December 2015. Colombia also launched the first Andean-based impact-investing fund in 2011, Inversor, which has invested in companies targeting the base of the socioeconomic pyramid in the food, hospitality, green construction, and recycling sectors. The business community has also propelled itself into social investment activities, stepping in to provide services the government was not able to deliver because of years of civil conflict.

In August, the Instituto de Cidadania Empresarial (ICE) and Vox Capital hosted the 2nd Brazilian Forum on Social Finance and Impact Business in São Paolo that attracted more than 800 participants from the Brazilian social finance and impact business ecosystem. The political corruption scandal and financial crisis have given rise to a new wave of social investment activity in which corporate foundations, wealthy families, and high-net-worth individuals are moving to fill a gap left by the government.

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