Frontier market funds significantly outperformed emerging market funds last year, with the top-performers in the frontier category returning as much as 33%. The eye-popping performance has caught investors’ attention, prompting a surge of interest in frontier-markets equity funds.

It's not hard to see why frontier funds are generating such a buzz. The MSCI Frontier Markets 100 Index gained 26.3% in 2013, while the MSCI Emerging Markets Index lost 5%. So far this year, the Frontier index is up 7.9% through March, while the Emerging index is down 0.8%.