In advance of the upcoming G8 meeting, the founder of ebay writes on The HuffingtonPost about whether our international economic system can address massive inequity, citing the billions of people that global capitalism has left behind.

We know firsthand that market-based solutions can be a powerful way to create jobs and deliver services to those who need them – at the scale required in a world of seven billion people. And we are especially heartened to see a new movement afoot called “social” impact investing, which explicitly seeks to apply the power of the market to help solve stubborn economic and social challenges.

– Pierre Omidyar, ebay founder

Impact investing, Omidyar notes, is a financing tool with enormous potential to help us reach social goals, by providing the upfront seed funding needed to get ideas off the ground, which can then be scaled to reach more peopleif they work. He cites M-PESA as a prime example, having been initially funded with money from Vodafone and the UK Department for International Development. “Launched in 2007, it now provides 15 million Kenyans – the vast majority of whom had previously no access to traditional bank accounts – the opportunity to deposit, withdraw and transfer funds through their mobile phones.”

Click on our stories below for more about impact investing, and follow the G8 next week to see if the concept is given further thoughtful due diligence by the world’s wealthiest nations.