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Despite slowing growth, rising interest rates and currency volatility, private equity fundraising for emerging markets is up sharply this year. Enthusiastic private equity investors are focusing on attractive pricing and long-term growth forecasts that are better than those in the world’s developed economies. Everyone should follow their lead.

In emerging markets today, stock and bond investors are pulling out, while private equity investors are piling in.

Nearly eight weeks into the new year, some $21 billion has been withdrawn from emerging market stock and bond funds, exceeding the $15.2 billion outflow for all of 2013, asset allocation tracker EPFR Global notes. Yet annual private equity fundraising for emerging markets is running 32 percent ahead of last year, according to data from Palico. the online private equity fund marketplace that I founded in 2012. A little more than $6.5 billion has been raised for emerging market private equity funds so far this year, while the category’s share of global fundraising stands at nearly 17 percent, almost double last year’s 8.5 percent.

In general, experienced private equity investors find short-term adversity and volatility appealing, as the upsurge in private equity emerging market fundraising shows. Against a backdrop of slower economic growth in emerging markets, stock and bond investors are spooked today by worries about the stability of local currencies as the Federal Reserve dials back on quantitative easing and U.S. interest rates start to rise.

Since the roughly ten-year investment horizon of private equity funds bridges the ups and downs of much longer economic cycles, private equity investors see that volatility as a fantastic buying opportunity. For prices that are in many instances a third lower than they were two years ago, emerging market fund managers are gaining exposure to economies with long-term annual growth near 5 percent, approximately twice the expected expansion rate of developed economies.

In a further indication of private equity’s enthusiasm for emerging markets, many of the largest global private equity fund managers are allocating more to developing economies.

During their recent quarterly earnings call, Blackstone senior executives Tony James and Steven Schwarzman underlined the appeal of emerging markets private equity investment opportunities as bank credit dries up, particularly in the real estate sector. With sale prices dropping, Scott Nutall, KKR’s asset management chief, said during his group’s earnings call that they are seeing “good buying opportunities” in Asia, where KKR recently closed a record-sized $6 billion fund, and in Brazil, where the firm opened an office last year. Meanwhile, Oaktree announced that they are allocating an additional $2 billion to emerging markets investments in the first half of 2014.

Given that the stock markets of most developing economies show large gaps in sector representation and are relatively narrow investment channels where values swell to excess at times of investor euphoria, private equity is also a better way to invest in emerging markets than is listed equity. A case in point: according to a recent report by Ernst & Young and the African Private Equity & Venture Capital Association, between 2007 and 2012 returns from realized private equity investments in Africa almost doubled gains over the same period from Johannesburg’s FTSE/JSE Africa All Share Index.

To gauge the return potential of emerging markets, pay attention to what private equity investors are doing with their money, not to what most stock and bond investors are doing. The uptick in private equity emerging market fundraising and investment signals what looks like one of the best buying opportunities of 2014.