Entrepreneur support programs are popular among donors, but many fail to incorporate rigorous research on the most effective ways to help businesses grow. Insights from current academic literature can help improve program design.

ANDE recently launched the entrepreneurial ecosystem snapshots of Ibadan and Port Harcourt, Nigeria. These reports expand on the study of the entrepreneurial landscape of Nigeria, of which Abuja and Lagos snapshots have been previously launched.

Starting a business anywhere is difficult, but an emerging market faces unique and particularly challenging hurdles. Uganda is the most entrepreneurial country in the world, but common difficulties such as funding and finding talent keep businesses from becoming sustainable. Listen to this podcast to learn more about ANDE's Uganda Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Initiative.

Investors cast aside economic growth concerns and deployed $1.4 billion into Latin American impact investments in 2016 and 2017. This is according to data compiled by the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) and the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America.

Move over Mexico, Peru is now the top destination in Latin America for impact investment capital. Impact investors invested a total of $1.4 billion in Latin America in 2016 and 2017. The uptick from the previous two-year period was driven by a doubling (from a small base) of capital from homegrown investors.

Women co-run businesses are outperforming their male-only counterparts, but not enough investors are betting on them. Here’s what we can do to support representative entrepreneurial ecosystems and how an India-based investor is pointing the way, according to ANDE's Senior Program Coordinator in India, Devyani Singh.

ANDE's Executive Director, Randall Kempner, was quoted in one of Brazil's major finance and economics newspapers after the 2018 Impacto Conference.

"More capital than ever is being raised by emerging-market private equity and venture capital funds. But less of it is going to small and growing businesses." Read Dennis Price's assessment of ANDE's most recent State of the Small and Growing Business Sector report.

Do accelerators really help entrepreneurs raise more money for their businesses? The answer so far seems to be yes – both in emerging market country contexts, as well as in high-income countries. But how much and to what extent they are effective varies greatly from program to program.

Until recently, we have known little about their effectiveness or how differences across programs and models influence entrepreneur performance. Vallabh Rao writes about the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative's (GALI) recently released report on a sample of incubators and accelerators in India.