Although environmental investing and entrepreneurship in emerging markets has undergone a transformation from a nascent concept to a burgeoning market over the past decade, clear challenges to greater growth remain. How do institutions collectively move from a retail approach – each institution supporting companies one by one – to a wholesale approach – truly developing an ecosystem of support for environmental SMEs in emerging economies? In other words, how do we get to scale so that these enterprises collectively are having real positive environmental impacts at a large scale?

Investment into environmental and social businesses is growing – many investors are pouring capital into emerging markets, and GDP growth rates of NV countries continue to grow. However, for environmental entrepreneurship to get to scale, there must be three conditions fulfilled, as in all other markets: there must be robust demand from investors for a pipeline of environmental enterprises, a promising supply of enterprises ready for investment, and solid transactional infrastructure to enable these investments.