"This report proposes actions that can be taken by ASEAN Governments and key stakeholders to address the constraints facing women entrepreneurs. Two key levers for change are highlighted. These are greater access to and use of innovative technologies, especially those made available through the ICT revolution; and creative approaches to making finance and credit available to women entrepreneurs. As well as being critical in their own right, these two levers also contribute to unlocking progress in other key areas, such as education and training, access to business support and networks and opening market opportunities."

"Does the lack of peers contribute to the observed gender gap in entrepreneurial success? A random sample of customers of India's largest women's bank was offered two days of business counseling, and a random subsample was invited to attend with a friend. The intervention significantly increased participants' business activity, but only if they were trained with a friend. Those trained with a friend were more likely to have taken out business loans, were less likely to be housewives, and reported increased business activity and higher household income, with stronger impacts among women subject to social norms that restrict female mobility."

"This report has focused on developing an in-depth, demand-side understanding of the needs and challenges facing inclusive businesses, rather than on studying the drivers and constraints of grantmakers and investors. However, we acknowledge that the latter is a valuable area for further study and action going forward.

The key themes discussed here are based on the sum of Monitor's extensive research into more than 700 inclusive businesses in Africa and India, and Acumen Fund's decade of experience as a pioneering impact investor. They also draw together the experiences and observations of dozens of impact investors, grant funders, academics and other experts."

"From Ideas to Practice, Pilots to Strategy is the second publication in the Forum's Mainstreaming Impact Investing Initiative. The report takes a deeper look at why and how asset owners began to include impact investing in their portfolios and continue to do so today, and how they overcame operational and cultural constraints affecting capital flow. Given that impact investing expertise is spread among dozens if not hundreds of practitioners and academics, the report is a curation of some -but certainly not all -of those leading voices. The 15 articles are meant to provide investors, intermediaries and policy-makers with actionable insights on how to incorporate impact investing into their work."

"Many investors and entrepreneurs are using creative ways to deploy financial capital in service of the world’s most intractable challenges, achieving both financial and social returns. This practice is known as “impact investing.” As impact investing spreads and becomes more commonplace, education and training will be increasingly crucial for investors and practitioners to access the knowledge and skills they need for success."

"A social impact bond (SIB) is a new approach for scaling social programs. Currently being piloted in the United Kingdom and generating interest globally, a SIB is a multistakeholder partnership in which philanthropic funders and impact investors—not governments—take on the financial risk of expanding preventive programs that help poor and vulnerable people. Nonprofits deliver the program to more people who need it; the government pays only if the program succeeds. Because the concept of a SIB is so new (the first and only SIB is the UK pilot mentioned above), information about how—and how well—this approach could work is very limited. In this report, the most thoroughly researched study of SIBs to date, we explain how SIBs are structured, assess their potential in two specific program areas (homelessness and criminal justice), describe the various stakeholder groups involved, and present the results of a pro forma analysis of a hypothetical SIB."

"Early-stage social entrepreneurship is creating grassroots change in communities across the world. It is a fundamental stage in the journey of every social venture and yet is under-resoourced and under-researched. In this report we reveal how support is currently provided to early-stage social entrepreneurs by diverse organisations, members of GSEN. It is the first step in our continuing efforts to empower the social entrepreneurship sector with knowledge,contributing to its growth and increased efficiency."

"This report offers a first set of insights, distilled from the knowledge of leading practitioners, on how to successfully integrate smallholders into value chains through effective service delivery and smallholder aggregation models. It uses case studies from five African and Asian countries."

"This report analyzes how twenty different donors and development finance institutions (DFIs) engage with the entrepreneurship and small & growing business (SGB) sector in emerging markets. The goal of this study is to provide an overview of the main channels through which these institutions provide funding to entrepreneurs and small and growing businesses in emerging markets, reveal key statistics around this funding (such as investment size and horizon), highlight trends to look out for over the course of the next few years, and discuss implications for how ANDE should engage with each institution moving forward."

"In economies characterized by low labor demand and high rates of youth unemployment, entrepreneurship training has the potential to enable youth to gain skills and create their own jobs. This paper presents experimental evidence on a new entrepreneurship track that provides business training and personalized coaching to university students in Tunisia."