A Blended Finance Perspective: De-Risking Social-Impact Business to Mobilize Private Capital

This interview-based research asks how the Vietnamese ecosystem of social-impact businesses (SIBs) may attract more private capital. Social-impact businesses are those models that are designed to solve pressing society whose problems through the delivery of business activities or market forces. An issue raised by previous reports is that Vietnam’s SIBs perform poorly in attracting private capital in comparison to its regional peers, Indonesia and the Philippines.

To answer this question, the report applies a framework called “blended finance,” which focuses on how to use public funding to de-risk the ecosystem. In a nutshell, the framework suggests that SIBs may better attract private capital when the risk faced by investors can be lowered enough to match their expected returns. Applying this thinking, this report explores ways that ecosystem builders can de-risk the following: the investment transaction itself, the enterprise, the business model, and the entrepreneur.

To view and download the entire report, please click here.