Evan Gill is Manager, Impact Investing, Aga Khan Foundation U.S.A. This post also appears on the blog ofwww.socialfinance.ca.

Surprise, excitement, admiration – I felt all these emotions listening to Edward Jackson and Karim Harji speak last month about impact investment in the Canadian context. Being entirely immersed in this sector in the U.S. and Europe, I came to Toronto for the Aga Khan Foundation Canada’s (AKFC) launch of its Seminars on Innovative Financing for Development, with the impression that impact investing in Canada was – at best – a long-term proposition.

This impression quickly was dispelled by Jackson, a faculty member at the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University, and Harji, a co-founder and partner at Purpose Capital. Their talk was peppered with examples of Canadian institutions engaging and building out the impact investing sector. The MaRS Centre for Impact Investing provides a space for public and private collaboration while housing initiatives such as an impact-first platform to connect investors with investable social enterprises (SVX). It also hosts Canada’s leading online information forum on social enterprise financing,SocialFinance.ca.

Canadian public and private sector actors have moved into impact investing, including Canada’s leading charitable grant-making foundation, Ontario’s Trillium Foundation, and its support for youth social entrepreneurship through the Future Fund. Two of Canada’s largest banks, TD Bank Group and RBC, have entered impact investing too, along with various branches of local and federal government (Human Resources and Skills Development Canada; British Columbia Business Corporations Act; Canadian Task Force on Social Finance; Nova Scotia Credit Union Small Business Loan Program).

The progress of these sector builders is evident in the speed with which Canadian academics, government, and investors have absorbed information from the global impact investing debate and expanded the dialogue. In little more than an hour, Jackson and Harji recapped the earliest discussions about the definition of impact investing and ran through current debates on the role of philanthropy and unlocking local capital. They moved nimbly through topics that could be roadblocks for others: definition(whoosh); metrics (vroom); how investments won’t cannibalize grants; when the venture capital model hits barriers (beep beep); identifying bottlenecks; the role of intermediaries, secondary markets, data / communication; unlocking large scale capital (revving); building sector infrastructure and track record; and government policy (zoom).

The comprehensive view that these speakers had of the impact investing sector amazed me. They understand its opportunities and boundaries, are working in it domestically, and bringing new ideas and topics for debate to the table. After attending this launch of AKFC’s Seminars on Innovative Financing for Development, I have high expectations for Canada’s full-scale entry into the global impact investing sector. I couldn’t be more excited to partner and learn from their experience.

I encourage you to view the archived webcast here, the past footage of AKFC’s April 30th launch of The New Microfinance Handbook here, and look out for their next two seminars on Innovative Financing for Early Childhood Education (May 16) and Local Assets for Local Needs: Community Philanthropy in Action (June 4). To register for upcoming events (in-person or live webinar), please click here.