Despite great investor interest in impact investing, actual investment flows have remained modest. This is largely due to insufficient investment opportunities which offer a financially sustainable risk-return balance. A focus on de-risking impact investments can enable investors to find more assets which offer commercial returns on a risk-adjusted basis, without sacrificing impact. By cutting off the lower tail of the risk distribution, impact investments can offer comparable returns to other investments, as has been the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC’s) experience. Successful impact investing involves selecting assets and structuring investments differently to realize their potential to deliver both financial and social returns. We segment the supply and demand of impact investing funds, and identify the causes of elevated risks in prevalent approaches to impact investing. Drawing on IFC’s investment experience, we identify seven ways to reduce these risks. With these approaches, we provide evidence that investment opportunities can be generated that meet the requirements of investors seeking both commercial financial returns and social impact without trading one off for the other.

benchmarking methodologies used by corporates to provide cross-country comparisons of the quality of business regulation. In doing so, it has demonstrated a radical new approach to catalyzing development, which has proven to have high impact in changing government regulations at low cost. It represents an open-source, knowledge-based approach to development which could be replicated across other development topics, taking into account the limitations of the methodology and the complementary elements of analysis and communication which have enabled Doing Business to have impact.