"Government, NGO, and business leaders typically see great promise for digital tools to empower smallholder value chains and make them more efficient and profitable for farmers. However, hope is not enough - new technologies only reach scale when they are delivered within a functioning business model.

To scale, the business model must provide a 1) Lifetime Value for each new customer which exceeds 2) the cost of acquiring each new customer. However, finding a business model which meets this requirement on small, remote farms is a tough job. Delivery and acquisition costs are typically high, and Lifetime Values low as each farmer's revenue is limited.

By observing the full range of solutions that have been developed across the ASEAN region, we see startups migrating to five business models which seem to show the greatest potential in reaching smallholder farmers at scale. This report provides an overview of those five business models, and why we think they show the greatest promise."

"This paper synthesises findings, based on case studies of social enterprises operating in the agriculture and health sectors in Kenya and Vietnam. Main conclusions are that the concept of social enterprise needs to be clearly defined if governments and donors want to give preferential support to such organisations and that defining social enterprise as a hybrid business model facilitates identification and analysis of enterprise models that are distinct from mainstream business. The research found that the social enterprises covered in the survey were often small, personality driven, and internationally supported. Social enterprises face special constraints linked to their hybrid business model: access to finance, human resources, legal status, difficult markets, and management weakness. Market and state failure creates niches for social enterprise: serving disadvantaged communities, managing public infrastructure, and creating environmental benefits. Governments, donors and promoters should assess the niche for social enterprise in specific market contexts in place of blanket promotion of the concept."

"This report was commissioned by Oxfam to analyze the effectiveness of development programs in addressing challenges faced by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the agriculture sector in Asia, and to dissect whether these interventions would be relevant for Social Enterprises (SEs) in the agriculture sector. The purpose of this report is to inform the decision-making of development programs that aim to catalyze the growth of SEs in agriculture and attract impact investment capital to fuel the growth of the food and agriculture sector in Asia."

"Small businesses are often believed to serve as engines for innovation, employment and social mobility, due to their flexibility in responding to new opportunities and their potential for rapid growth. In developing countries, SMEs make up a particularly large part of the economy, yet data suggests that very few small enterprises in developing countries grow into larger businesses. Researchers conducted a qualitative study of a consulting program in the Philippines designed to help SMEs expand, investigating the obstacles that consultants identified as constraints to firm growth. They found that there is no "one-size-fits-all" approach to business training - most firms have a complex, interconnected set of challenges."

"With more than a quarter of the Philippines' 100 million-strong population living below the poverty line, efforts to tackle poverty and improve living, working and health conditions must be stepped up if the populous Southeast Asian nation is to achieve its Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) commitments by 2030.

This publication aims to demonstrate how Inclusive Business can be engaged in the Philippines to contribute to achieving national development priorities and the SDGs -and how governments and other stakeholders can create an environment in which such business models thrive and reach scale."

"The extensive and ever-increasing penetration of mobile phones in developing and emerging markets presents a significant opportunity to women entrepreneurs who want to develop their micro businesses into flourishing small and growing enterprises. The objective of this study was to identify the most useful mobile value added services (VAS) solutions which would enable women entrepreneurs to advance their businesses in selected geographies. As a result of this identification exercise, this report serves as a valuable reminder that investment in mobile VAS presents promising and beneficial outcomes for commercial stakeholders, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), governments and women entrepreneurs alike."

"This report is part of a wider study that aims to unpack the contribution of Gender Lens Investing in women’s economic empowerment, and builds on the existing literature on the understanding of the finance gap for women-owned enterprises in developing countries. It is based on insights gathered from 200+ women entrepreneurs across Kenya, Rwanda, India and Indonesia. While analysing the factors affecting access to finance for women entrepreneurs, the report touches upon its effect on their lives in terms of impact on their agency, bargaining power, ability to challenge patriarchal attitudes, and financial independence, through examples. The report posits a segmentation framework to bring out the differentiated characteristics, needs and challenges of women-owned businesses businesses."

"This paper presents the preliminary results of our ongoing study of corrective policy intervention in cluster-based industrial development. At the center of this study is a field experiment that we are conducting in a knitwear cluster in Ha Noi (previously Ha Tay) and a rolled steal cluster in Bac Ninh in Vietnam. In these clusters, we conducted baseline surveys of firms from April to July 2010 and then provided classroom training programs for entrepreneurs in June to August of the same year. The evaluation of the training impacts is expected to reveal whether entrepreneurs in clusters possess basic knowledge of management before the training, what characterizes the entrepreneurs who are more willing and able to absorb new knowledge, whether the training can change entrepreneurs' attitudes toward learning management knowledge, how much entrepreneurs can learn from a short-period training program, and whether the benefit of the training program exceeds its cost, among others."

"We organized business associations for the owner-managers of young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,820 firms into small groups whose managers held monthly meetings for one year, and into a "no-meetings" control group. We find the following. (i) The meetings increased firm revenue by 8.1%, and also significantly increased profit, factors, inputs, the number of partners, borrowing, and a management score. (ii) These effects persisted one year after the conclusion of the meetings. (iii) Firms randomized to have better peers exhibited higher growth. We exploit additional interventions to document concrete channels. (iv) Managers shared exogenous business-relevant information, particularly when they were not competitors, showing that the meetings facilitated learning from peers. (v) Managers created more business partnerships in the regular than in other one-time meetings, showing that the meetings improved supplier-client matching."

"ANGIN Team is glad to share some of the latest insights on this investing in impact landscape in Indonesia. For the first report of this kind, our research and investment team analyzed hundreds of transactions and deep dived into investor case studies to extract some of the key trends shaping the market."