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"The purpose of the information presented in this report is to inventory different organizations in Uganda that could help build local capacity and catalyze and accelerate SME development and growth. The report includes a contextual overview of Uganda, which helps to shed light on some of the challenges and opportunities for SME development and poverty alleviation. This information puts into perspective some of the key sectors that have been the focus of enterprise development activities. The report also includes an overview of key donor programs, as they can often stimulate SME-related activities and also provide a sense of where large interventions in the SME landscape are occurring."

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"Donor agencies and foundations use grants to stimulate entrepreneurial growth in developing countries. However, some practitioners have asked whether these grants tend to flow to expatriate entrepreneurs with ties to developed countries (where most grants originate), rather than to local entrepreneurs. This article tackles this question using a data set of 3,434 nascent ventures from 92 developing countries. The authors find that ventures with ties to a developed country are significantly more likely to raise grant financing and in more substantial amounts. Ventures with a founder born in a developed country are the most likely to receive grants, with a weaker effect when considering prior work experience in a developed country. This “expat gap” cannot be explained by differences in education level, prior experience, or ties to other developing countries. Donors seeking to support local entrepreneurs in developing countries should consider ways to make their recruitment and selection processes more equitable."

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"This study, which is part of a larger financial performance series, provides the first comprehensive analysis of the financial performance of 55 private real assets impact investment funds in three sectors: timber, real estate, and infrastructure. The report also launches the Real Assets Impact Investing Benchmarks, which will continue to track the financial performance of impact investing funds across the three sectors; Cambridge Associates will update performance data on the benchmarks quarterly. Encouragingly, the findings show that risk-adjusted market rate returns are achievable in impact investing, as evidenced by return distributions of similar funds with no environmental or social objectives; however, fund selection remains important."

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"This first of a kind report provides detailed cluster analysis of 398 impact enterprises across the three levers in five East African countries. The report is written and presented to be useful to all development sector stakeholders, with specific insights to inform decisions of investors, enterprises, and non-financial support providers across East Africa."

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"The Gender Equality Mainstreaming (GEM) Framework is a practical manual and toolkit for assessing gender equality, and identifying, implementing and measuring gender equality mainstreaming strategies within companies. The framework builds upon the environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment standard by mainstreaming gender across ESG criteria. Designed for organizations seeking financial and impact returns through investing or providing support to companies, the manual is applicable to a wide range of investors (e.g. private equity funds, government donors, foundations) and capacity builders (e.g. accelerators, technical assistance providers, NGOs). The ultimate aim of the framework is to transform companies to be more gender equitable while supporting business growth and impact."

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"The Global Cleantech Innovation Index (GCII) programme investigates where, relative to GDP, entrepreneurial clean technology companies are most likely to emerge from over the next 10 years - and why. Drawing on a wide range of factors and sources, the study seeks to answer the same question as the 2012 and 2014 GCII reports, namely: which countries currently have the greatest potential to produce entrepreneurial cleantech start-up companies that will commercialise clean technology innovations over the next 10 years?"

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"Developing ecosystems can be a fuzzy business. Together with 300 partners, we made it a science. Startup Genome has nearly doubled the number of ecosystems studied since 2019 - assessing over 270 ecosystems across over 100 countries to rank the top 30 globally and runners-up."

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"The GRI Standards help organizations’ understand their outward impacts: on the economy, environment, and society. This increases accountability and enhances transparency on their contribution to sustainable development. Organizations can either use the GRI Standards to prepare a sustainability report in accordance with the Standards. Or they can use selected Standards, or parts of their content, to report information for specific users or purposes, such as reporting their climate change impacts for their investors and consumers."

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"This paper is part of the Compendium of Evidence on the Effectiveness of Innovation Policy Intervention. This paper examines publicly supported policies for entrepreneurship development. Entrepreneurship policies are directed to encouraging socially and economically productive activities by individuals acting independently in business. Their principal objective is to increase a level of entrepreneurial activity which is considered to be below the social optimum. Policies may be implemented directly to address entrepreneurs' needs e.g. business advice programmes or through broadcast methods such as education policy. We have attempted to locate and focus on evaluations that reported on additionality / net effect or that use methods of causal inference to determine the effectiveness and impacts of policy. While policies and programmes for entrepreneurship can be simplistically modelled as a series of inputs beginning with cultural change followed by general and then more specific skill development, it is hard nevertheless to assess impact or trace causality because of the difficulty of defining discrete units of input, the presence of confounding factors and the length of time over which effects can build."

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"The Impact Investing Landscape in Latin America is a joint report by the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) and the The Association for Private Capital in Latin America (LAVCA). The 2018 edition of the report provides an updated, comprehensive look on the state of impact investing across Latin America. Using survey data from over 60 investors in the region, the report outlines trends in investment activity in 2016 and 2017, examines challenges for investors, and evaluates the future of impact investing in Latin America - where investors plan to deploy an additional US$2b in capital over the next two years."

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