The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) releases new research on organizations that promote entrepreneurship and support rural MSMEs. Each snapshot provides local data on available services and most needed support, with additional insights regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) presents the second report on Central America from the Global Acceleration Learning Initiative (GALI). It explores startup data as well as qualitative findings on accelerators and investors.

Women entrepreneurs deserve equitable access to financial and technical support so they can bring climate innovations to market. Here's how ANDE is supporting the women delivering climate solutions at local and global levels.

"Impact Investing in Latin America: Trends 2018-2019" provides a snapshot of the impact investing sector in Latin America over the past two years, with particular focus on Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.

The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), a global network working to advance emerging market entrepreneurship, recently partnered with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to support a set of partnerships explicitly designed to help small and growing businesses (SGBs) improve their own approaches to collecting and using data on gender to increase their impact. These projects were more than an exercise in changing perspectives. Instead, we collectively and purposefully attempted to “flip the script” toward empowering business owners and managers with the agency and tools to harness their data – not for the researcher’s benefit, but for their own business and community development.

As American small businesses continue to be squeezed by the fallout of the COVID-19 crisis, it is increasingly clear that the approximately $659 billion already committed by Congress won’t be enough. It is similarly unlikely that unprecedented spending by governments will be enough to turn back the tide in Europe and elsewhere. But as bad as things are for the private sector in the wealthiest nations, an even greater disaster looms over the small and growing businesses that represent the economic engine of the developing world—with no bailout in sight.

In May, the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs announced that its new Advancing Women’s Empowerment Fund will offer grants to eight organizations. With support from the US Agency for International Development and the Visa Foundation, the $1.2 million fund will target the finance gap for women-led small and growing businesses in South and Southeast Asia.

Fund will distribute up to $1.2 million in grant capital across eight winning proposals out of a pool of more than 180 total applications.

In emerging markets, the COVID-19 crisis presents an even greater economic challenge than in the United States. The American economy was the strongest in the world before the crisis. Even now, under widespread stay-at-home orders, US unemployment has risen to only 20%, whereas most emerging market countries started the year with formal unemployment rates well above 20%.

The Aspen Network for Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), a membership organization for small and mid-sized enterprises in emerging markets, is a member of the Alliance and the R3 network launched by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). When the pandemic hit, ANDE looked for ways to support its members — which naturally meant reaching out to other organizations. Randall Kempner, ANDE’s Executive Director, is cautiously optimistic that the networks will make a difference, even if just to share best practices.