The feature that all my experiences this summer had in common was sticky weather. On July 9, as I strode into the conference room in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, I couldn’t stop thinking that the city was far too humid for me to be wearing a suit. My glasses had fogged up and I was covered in sweat, anxious about having arrived to the event 10 minutes late. But what I lacked in punctuality I made up for with enthusiasm: I’d crossed a (very small) sea to talk about the little-known role development banks play in social entrepreneurship.

A day earlier I’d flown to Colombo from India, where I’d been supporting a project for Yale Inclusion Economics. The following week I would start my internship with the Economic Policy team of World Bank’s Colombo office. In the interim, the Social Innovation Initiative, a program hosted by the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, agreed to sponsor a presentation of mine on social entrepreneurship. I delivered the talk at “Dignity: A Conference for All,” an event put on by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo.

Social entrepreneurship has an obvious connection to dignity: across the Global South, social enterprises are engineering ingenious solutions to society’s most pressing challenges, helping vulnerable populations live more dignified, self-sufficient lives. But what about development banks? What do they have to do with social entrepreneurship?

Development banks lend billions of dollars to Global South governments and finance projects that help their economies grow and improve their peoples’ quality of life. On the one hand, development finance and social entrepreneurship share the goal of building a more dignified, equitable world. On the other, their timelines appear incompatible. In the fast-paced world of entrepreneurship, startups can form and implode in days. Development banks, meanwhile, rely on a consensus-based decision-making process that may take months or years. By the time a development bank decides to fund a startup, the startup may no longer exist.

While the World Bank might struggle to address this gap by itself, it’s not alone. The International Finance Corporation, the arm of the World Bank Group that lends to the private sector, has prioritized supporting small and medium enterprises, including startups. The IFC has a reputation for moving a bit faster than the World Bank — a necessity for the private sector’s pace of dealmaking. The IFC also isn’t afraid to call in help from the private sector.

The Startup Catalyst is a pool of money that the IFC distributes to venture funds across the world, from Kenya to Palestine. Those funds, in turn, have the discretion to invest in promising startups in whichever emerging market they serve. To date the IFC has given money to 25 accelerators and seed funds, which in turn have provided funding to 768 startups in 55 countries.

The IFC’s work has worldwide reach. In Egypt a startup led by two women, one of them a cancer survivor, provides prescriptions to hard-to-reach clients. That startup received an investment from the Cairo-based accelerator Flat6Labs, itself a beneficiary of the Startup Catalyst. Flat6Labs has supported over 100 startups, offering them business advice as well as money.

Development banks’ role in social entrepreneurship is only growing. Three years ago the IFC launched a separate, $225 million platform to strengthen the digital economy in neglected regions of Africa and Asia. At the time the IFC noted that Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Pakistan received only 2 percent of the world’s venture capital. The African and Asian Development Banks, frequent partners of the World Bank, are likewise expanding their support to social entrepreneurship on their respective continents.

The IFC has been active in Sri Lanka. It poured $2.5 million into PickMe, a ride-hailing company similar to Uber that I used to book a tuk-tuk to the World Bank office each day (Sri Lanka also has Uber, but I wanted to support PickMe in the spirit of social entrepreneurship). The IFC and the Asian Development Bank have also run programs to promote women’s role in the economy and support women-led businesses, including startups.

Let’s go back to my earlier question: what do development banks have to do with social entrepreneurship? They provide funding for social enterprises ignored by traditional venture capital. My talk at the “Dignity” conference emphasized this point, and I saw it in action once my internship started. While I wasn’t working with the IFC, its office sat just a floor below the World Bank’s. I took frequent trips downstairs to talk with the IFC investment officers about their work (and, more than once, to crash their delicious team breakfasts). Like everyone upstairs at the World Bank, they cared about working to make Sri Lanka and the world a better place.

Whether in the public sector or the private, the World Bank Group stands by its mission “to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet.” No wonder, then, that it’s turned to entrepreneurs — champions of social innovation — to realize this vision.