"This report is aimed specifically at helping social sector funders use their resources in the best possible way. It helps them understand if, when and how to use the different financial instruments available to support social entrepreneurs in the most efficient and effective way. It also helps clarify what hybrid finance is, and how it can be used to channel more resources towards social entrepreneurship, in a more effective manner, while highlighting some of the challenges this practice brings about."

"Training programmes are popular development interventions that aim to address problems of youth unemployment. This paper estimates the impact of a youth entrepreneurship programme in Tanzania on financial literacy and employment knowledge. Using primary data within a successive cohort design in a community-led programme, the authors employed propensity score matching and fixed-effect estimation methods to assess changes in knowledge, skills and attitudes of marginalised youth. They found strong positive effects of the programme on key intermediate employment outcomes: savings ability, employment confidence and personal finance. The positive impact of this programme supports youth entrepreneurship training programme and non-experimental evaluation methods."

"The following report builds upon desk research as well as key observations from the workshop, "Financing Renewable Energy in South East Asia" workshop held in Phnom Penh in December, 2017. The event was an opportunity to address the current challenges entrepreneurs face when trying to access finance in SEA (with a geographic focus on Cambodia and Myanmar). We hope that this work will educate entrepreneurs on the type of financing available to them as well as serve as a reference for donors on why certain financing schemes are relevant and more successful in the RE sector and in the SEA region."

"From investments in publicly listed corporations based on environmental, social, and governance factors, to bonds issued to fund climate and environmental improvements; from micro-credit to small retailers through innovative credit assessments, to parametric insurance products improving the disaster resilience of countries, the world of sustainable finance is growing and becoming increasingly diverse.

In this report, we take a closer look at these innovations and more, highlighting how they are working to mobilize private-sector capital at scale to address social and environmental challenges. We also explore recent developments and potential opportunities in Asia's four largest economies: China, India, Japan, and Indonesia."

"The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are an ambitious and universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity. The SDGs also present a tremendous opportunity for investors to support this global agenda by deploying increasing amounts of capital to high-impact projects that address these critical societal challenges.

These case studies show the increasingly sophisticated and targeted ways in which impact investors are directing capital towards the SDGs, designing products to address one or several goals, by incorporating them throughout the investment cycle: during sourcing and due diligence, investment selection and structuring, investment management, and exit."

"Impact investing has the potential to enable every foundation, regardless of size, to pursue its philanthropic mission more effectively. It can help individual donors, families, foundations with few or no staff, and all sorts of giving entities put more and different types of capital to work for social good. Even better, it can deliver philanthropic impact alongside financial returns—which can enable reinvestment of those funds in pursuit of even more social good.

We offer this guide with that opportunity in mind—and specifically to support small-staffed foundations seeking to use impact investing to further their missions. It provides a starting point, a review of key questions to consider and ways to answer them, and a variety of tools and connections to additional resources you may need."

"We estimate the demand for business training among entrepreneurs in Jamaica. We use either a re-framed version of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism or take-it-or-leave-it (TIOLI) offers to elicit willingness to pay for business training. We find that the majority of entrepreneurs have a positive willingness to pay for training, which suggests some scope for providers to help partially recover the costs of offering training. Our results indicate that charging a higher price for the course screens out a large share of entrepreneurs, in particular those entrepreneurs with fewer assets, who are more risk-averse business owners, and those who do not expect to benefit as much from the training. Providing a credit option does not affect take-up of the course. We find that higher willingness to pay is correlated with higher attendance, and conditionally on paying a positive price, those who are offered higher prices are more likely to attend, pointing to psychological or sunk-cost effects. However, this does not fully compensate for the reduction in participation in training due to the extensive margin effect of charging higher prices. Finally, we find some evidence that business training encourages higher adoption of business practices and improves business knowledge.

Our follow-up survey suffered from high attrition, which limits our ability to detect impacts on sales and profits. We do not see that effects are stronger for entrepreneurs paying higher prices or with higher willingness to pay, but a lack of statistical power also means that we cannot rule out the possibility that those
who pay higher prices do benefit more. We conclude that the optimal price for governments to charge may therefore lie somewhere in between free or nominal cost and market price, and depend on how governments trade-off equity and efficiency."

"In Mexico, microenterprises and SMEs make up 99 percent of firms, employ about 64 percent of the workforce, and account for more than 40 percent of GDP. Given the importance of SMEs in the economy, governments in Mexico over the past twenty years have established a wide variety of SME support programs. How effective these SME programs have been in achieving their objectives is unclear.

This paper evaluates SME support programs in Mexico using a panel of firm-level data for two groups of firms-a treatment group that participated in SME programs and a control group that did not. The panel data have been created by linking SME program participation information to a large panel of annual industrial surveys (1994-2005) maintained by Mexico's National Institute of Statistics and Geography."

"As part of an effort to increase the evidence related to youth entrepreneurship in the Arab world, the ILO has joined with regional partners to create the Taqeem initiative. Taqeem provides support for the rigorous evaluation of youth interventions and disseminates findings and recommendations on “what works” in youth employment. As part of the Taqeem initiative, a global research team was assembled to evaluate the impact of an innovative youth entrepreneurship reality TV show in Egypt called El Mashrou3, produced and directed by the international NGO Bamyan Media. Bamyan defines the primary objective of the show as: to use the power of mass media to inspire a new generation of youth entrepreneurs. This is achieved through broadcasting messages about entrepreneurship skills and good business practices. In addition to producing the show, Bamyan Media carried out support activities to create a bridge between El Mashrou3 and the real world. A website was created so that viewers could access online courses, educational videos and mentoring services. Public viewing parties and networking events were also organized.

This report has several purposes. The first is to set out clearly for the study team and for interested parties all the details involved in selecting the study population, including details of the random selection process used. The second is to summarize information from the baseline survey to give a picture of the types of young people involved in the study. Finally, the report provides background information about the TV show itself, the contestants and the content of the episodes. It should be noted that only minimal data are presented from the baseline survey, as data continue to be collected, improved and analysed."

"This document contains recommendations on creating effective micro, small, and medium sized enterprise (MSME) mentoring programs for practitioners and supporters. A key driver for reducing global poverty and unemployment is increasing the growth and sustainability of MSMEs. While technical assistance, financing, and other initiatives can help MSMEs to achieve growth and sustainability, mentoring can also have high returns on investment. This is unsurprising, given mentoring’s historic origins in the areas of knowledge sharing and social networks. Yet there is a lack of consensus on what defines effective mentoring, evidence on good practices, and guidance on implementation. This publication addresses these gaps."