"This report stems from a point of view shared by Toniic and Shell Foundation: that venture philanthropists and impact investors actively collaborating can increase the amount of impact investment capital into early-stage impact enterprises. The objective of this report is to provide a practical and user-friendly guide primarily for impact investors to encourage them to deploy their investment capital directly or indirectly (via financial intermediaries and funds) into impact enterprises at an earlier stage. In particular, we have targeted individual investors and family offices."

"This report summarizes a more comprehensive assessment undertaken in 2017 which examined the characteristics of women-led, small and growing businesses (SGBs) in Mexico. Aimed at understanding Mexico's current entrepreneurial ecosystem and the financial and non-financial barriers facing female entrepreneurs, the assessment offered recommendations for how different actors can support women entrepreneurs. Available to a wide audience as a learning report, this summary assessment contributes valuable insights into how a broader set of actors implementing services and programmes for women entrepreneurs can improve their support to women in their entrepreneurship endeavours in Mexico and beyond."

"We’ve written this guide for charities who seek to evaluate their work, or measure their impact. Measuring means using data and evidence, both quantitative and qualitative, to gain useful insights about your charity’s work. It’s about understanding whether your project or service made a difference in people’s lives. If yes, how so? If not, why not?

This guide follows on from our Theory of change in ten steps, which we want you to use as the basis of your measurement framework. We explain how to turn your theory of change into a plan for measurement, the five types of data you will need to pay attention to, and how to prioritise what to measure. Finally, we’ve included seven mini-guides below looking closer at specific aspects of evaluation."

"This report, designed for international development organizations, governments, and financial institutions, does the following: 1) highlights the key barriers facing women-led small enterprises across the developing world; 2) identifies how hidden gender and ethnic biases impact the growth of women-led businesses; 3) presents the results of a pilot case study in Guatemala inspired by a novel methodology, first applied to mortgage lending in the United States, that seeks to test for bias in bank-lending decisions for small enterprises; and 4) provides recommendations for policymakers and financial institutions on how this methodology can be applied in developing countries."

"This report was published as part of an interest in expanding knowledge and contribution to create a more enabling environment for inclusive business. The intentions of this are: firstly, to illustrate how the consideration of BoP communities exclusively through their income levels is limiting and can be misleading for practitioners; and secondly, to develop a series of recommendations to governments and public institutions on how to create an enabling environment for inclusive business models."

"This report presents the Rankings and Recognitions derived from the World Benchmark Study 2019-2020, sponsored by Qatar Development Bank. While traditional incubation and acceleration powerhouses in North America and Western Europe continue to be strongly represented, programs from around the world have captured top spots, underscoring the global importance of university, public, private and corporate incubators and accelerators for successfully nurturing the visionaries and changemakers of tomorrow."

"Inspired by an efficacy debate, this paper aims to understand to what extent do entrepreneurs value business accelerators and what contributes to this value. And as entrepreneurs consider accelerators to be a viable alternative to traditional business incubators, the research seeks to compare these startup support options."

"We propose that using simulation experiments with random assignment of players to roles presents a useful way to test and expand organization theory and elucidate the interplay between micro-processes and macro phenomena. In this paper, we discuss the advantages of using these simulations to conduct organizational experiments at scale and illustrate the usefulness of these experiments by looking at theorized causes of entrepreneurial gender bias using The Startup Game, a role-playing simulation of capital raising in Silicon Valley. In this game, we randomly assigned 27,082 players in 259 organizations to founder and investor roles involving fictional companies. We thereby generated multiple "worlds" with different features, which enabled us to look at how player role assignment influenced organizational outcomes. We found that assigning identical startups to female (vs. male) founders systematically resulted in 11 percent lower valuations from investors. We looked at variation across game runs using data from multi-founder teams to understand why. We found that assigning one percent more female players to the investor role resulted in lowering the gender gap in startup funding by 272 percent. These results suggest that equalizing the investor pool potentially holds the key to reducing entrepreneurial gender bias. We discuss the implications of our findings for the value of using simulated experiences to design more equitable organizations and markets."

"Timbali Technology Incubator in the Mpumalanga region of South Africa seeks to help rural farmers whose livelihood has been undercut by high-volume large farms. Supported by government financing and fee-based services, Timbali is largely based on a franchise model. Its clients supply cut flowers to Amablom,Timbali’s commercial arm. Individual clients can begin generating revenue almost immediately. Timbali helps clients both onsite and off, training them in business methods and helping them find loans to get started. It is helping clients expand intoother product lines and value-added food processing, and plans to export its model into other parts of South Africa."

"This toolbox is the result of a collaborative process between Practical Action and the Institute of Socio-Economic Research of the Bolivian Catholic University "San Pablo" (IISEC-UCB). The complementarity of visions and action areas reflects in an innovative proposal that aims to respond to a frequent and growing need by non governmental organizations: to measure the impact of gender-focused actions promoted by development projects, in this case productive."