Austrian Skills in East Africa: A Story of Knowledge, Expertise and Impact Investing

Impact investing is developing in countries where the lack of credit availability implies that poor people borrow at very high rates of interest. Web based micro-credit platforms tended to retain mostly intermediary roles, preventing peer to peer engagement but this situation seemed to change since the end of the XXth century toward a more bottom-up approach. As a work in progress, this paper aims at complementing the literature on microcredit and impact investment through the study of a recent operation mixing both approaches by Oikocredit, a famous international impact investing organization, in Austria, a country enjoying a specifically high level of charity involvement, involving both impact investing and direct contact with East-African project bearers.