The 2022 Latin American Impact Ecosystem Outlook survey is Latimpacto's initiative to understand the characteristics, barriers, and opportunities of the impact investing ecosystem, in order to establish a roadmap for its strengthening and growth.
Specific data on AUM, impact intent, or investment vehicles can be a tool for considering services and projects that enhance knowledge within the ecosystem. For example, the 2022 survey, which collected information from 101 ecosystem actors, shows that the main financial vehicles are donations (39%) and debt (15%), and the less common ones are guarantees (2.4%) and subordinated loans (3.66%), and that 25% of ecosystem actors use catalytic capital.
These data show the potential for action that networks like Latimpacto can develop. In our case, the data served as a starting point for defining training topics, designing tools like the innovative finance toolkit, conducting research such as the Catalytic Capital study, and developing programs like the corporate impact initiative.
For its part, the identification of best practices and barriers quantitatively demonstrates
aspects that were "intuitions" between sectors, which allows for actions to be taken from a more informed perspective, and are consolidated as an opportunity to consider the next steps.
- Best practices: The use of indicators and a system that allows monitoring the impact (67%), the incorporation of a theory of change (61%) and the intention to work with different private and/or public sectors to increase the impact (56%).
- Barriers: lack of collaboration between actors in the impact ecosystem to mobilize more resources (46.5%), lack of an efficient or adequate regulatory framework that encourages investment/donation for impact (45.5%) and lack of knowledge and/or practical tools that allow measuring social and/or environmental impact (33.7%)
The above highlights the need to generate dialogue with the public sector and share data and good practices to impact public policy, a key step for actors who deploy resources along the capital continuum to explore new financial vehicles and impact-generating strategies.
Likewise, we will need to continue exploring measurement dynamics and go beyond measuring management or the number of people impacted to understand the changes that are (or are not) being generated. The best way to move forward is to take the first step, testing measurement methodologies and tools and sharing best practices, as there is still no global response on the correct way to do so.
We invite you to learn about the results here.
If you haven't answered the survey, we invite you to do so at: Perspective of the Impact Ecosystem in Latin America.
