"G7 countries now have a strategic opportunity to scale up green and sustainable finance for SMEs. This could help support and strengthen the role that SMEs can play in connecting business growth, innovation strategies and entrepreneurial efforts with climate action and sustainable development. Mobilizing Sustainable Finance for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises. To this end, a Sustainable Finance Toolbox for SMEs has been developed which contains a range of options for G7 countries to implement on a voluntary basis in partnership with key stakeholders such as financial institutions, SME business associations, public financial institutions, as well as central banks and regulators."

"This document describes our development of an impact management approach, which we define as the management of assets in order to meet explicit impact goals (alongside financial goals). It is primarily intended for existing or prospective impact investors – although we hope the logic can also be relevant for other practitioners engaged in philanthropy and sustainability, in the interests of coordinating the various approaches to creating societal impact."

"Investments designed specifically to promote development are not new, but their application across a broad range of sectors-from moderate-income housing, to health care, water and sanitation, and rural development-is recent. And they raise several critical questions for development policy. Are they an effective new tool for long-term development? Are they likely to reach the scale necessary to be part of an overall development strategy?

This report offers an important survey and analysis of the field. Impact investing has the potential to spur development in regions and sectors that traditional foreign direct investment does not target, but it faces many challenges, notably market fragmentation and a lack of infrastructure. The authors, former executive vice president of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and former CGD visiting fellow, John Simon, and Julia Barmeier suggest concrete steps that will help the market mature and grow, with separate and specific recommendations for practitioners, development finance institutions, and regulators."

"Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) are uniquely positioned to address the troubling trend of rising wealth and income inequality in the United States by focusing on the creation of higher quality jobs. To move toward a reality where quality jobs are the standard- not the exception-CDFIs must build consensus around a common definition of a quality job, undertake practical efforts to foster the creation of quality jobs, and measure results to understand what works.

This discussion paper seeks to answer two important questions at the center of Community Development Financial Institutions' (CDFIs) efforts to create quality jobs: what is a quality job, and how can CDFIs measure job quality?"

"During the past 10 years of impact investing in Brazil, we have observed a significant development in the impact investing space.

This market study of the impact investing sector in Brazil reveals significant market growth. Nineteen of Brazil's largest impact investors, including fund managers, banks, foundations, family offices and others surveyed expect to commit 40% to 50% more capital to impact investments in 2014 compared to 2013."

"Understanding the performance of accelerators is important to a wide range of individuals and organizations: participating startups, accelerator managers and staff, investors, partners, donors, funders, and policymakers. Each of these stakeholders may have different priorities and objectives in their efforts to measure accelerators' performance and impact. This brief identifies considerations and potential metrics for evaluating accelerator performance. In addition to metrics related to the accelerator itself, it includes measures that assess the performance of startups, and changes in the regions in which accelerators are located."

"Designing resilience programs that effectively strengthen women's resilience capacities requires a detailed understanding of each pathway in the program setting. In recognition of the need for context-specific gender and resilience analysis, BRIGE (Building Resilience through Integration of Gender and Empowerment) worked with resilience programs in Indonesia, Nepal, and Niger to develop and to pilot measurement tools that serve multiple purposes for gender integration in Mercy Corps' resilience-focused programs. These purposes include identifying gender-related barriers to resilience, measuring how resilience programs affect these pathways, and supporting staff learning.

This report synthesizes lessons learned from the pilot studies where these tools were developed and applied. It provides guidance on how to contextualize future applications of the tools for different situations and purposes, as well as how to interpret and analyze findings. The report presents the three gender and resilience tools with suggested learning goals, tool questions and instructions, interpretation and analysis, lessons from the pilots, and ways to modify the tools for a specific context."

"This report outlines impact investors' approaches to achieving responsible exits, drawing insights from interviews with more than 30 investors and entrepreneurs and a review of existing resources on the topic. Four case studies of various exit methods as applied to investments in a natural gas conversion company, a microfinance institution, land conservation, and a microinsurance provider highlight the various effective practices and lessons that investors have discovered when working with investees and co-investors to align capital structures, buyers, and business models to ensure continued impact post-exit."

"Entrepreneurs are key actors in the transformation of low-income societies characterized by low productivity and often subsistence self-employment into dynamic economies characterized by innovation and a rising number of well-remunerated workers. To the extent that causal links from entrepreneurship to productivity growth are at work, there is room for using policy levers to quicken the development process by improving the incentives and supportive institutions that facilitate innovation by entrepreneurs. These analytical and policy issues motivate this report, which explores the challenges faced by potential high-growth, transformational entrepreneurs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)."

"Many of the available developmental evaluation resources focus on theory rather than practical experience. The DEPA-MERL consortium has documented early lessons learned from its experience and is pleased to offer guidance for organizations, managers, and evaluators that seek to implement this approach."