"The Government of Nicaragua and the US foreign assistance agency, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, launched a rural business services program designed to boost the income of the small farm sector. Relying on a randomized rollout strategy, this paper reports the results of a multi-year impact evaluation that spanned the 5-year life of the program. We argue that impacts of a program of this sort are unlikely to be fully revealed by standard binary treatment estimators and show that temporal pattern of impact indeed evolves in important ways over time. Income in the activities targeted by the program steadily rose, plateauing at a 30% increase over baseline after two years in the program. The program also appears to have provoked signicant increases in both mobile and perhaps xed farm capital. However, on average there have been no signicant impacts on household living standards to date. Finally, conditional quantile regressions give evidence of quite substantial heterogeneity in program impact."

"En septiembre de 2020, la Red Aspen de Emprendedores para el Desarrollo (ANDE por sus siglas en inglés) publicó un estudio titulado “Inversión de Impacto en América Latina”, que examina las tendencias en la región durante 2018 -2019. A continuación se muestra un enfoque sobre América Central, que utiliza datos del informe completo para resaltar tendencias clave en países centroamericanos, durante este período de dos años."

"In September 2020, the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) published a study titled “Impact Investing in Latin America”, which examines trends in the region during 2018 - 2019. Below is a spotlight on Central America, which uses data from the full report to highlight key trends in Central American countries during this two year period."

"The purpose of the information presented in this report is to inventory different organizations in Nicaragua that could help build local capacity and catalyze and accelerate SME development and growth.

The report includes a contextual overview of Nicaragua, which helps to shed light on some of the challenges and opportunities for SME development and poverty alleviation. This information also puts into perspective some of the key sectors that have been the focus of capacity development organizations. The report also includes an overview of key donor activities, as they can often stimulate SME-related activities and also provide a sense of where large interventions in the SME landscape are occurring."

"The objective of this paper is to understand the mechanisms by which development projects facilitate market linkage of smallholder farmers based on panel data from Nicaragua. We find that activities related to entrepreneurial practices have positive and statistically significant effect on commercialization. We also find that increased commercialization is positively correlated with total bean sales income, suggesting a positive indirect effect of the activities. Other activities demonstrate no positive and robust effect on commercialization while direct positive effects on sales income can be observed. This implies that market linkage of smallholder farmers require different sets of intervention tools than traditional farm technical assistance."

"The Global Accelerator Learning Initiative collects information from entrepreneurs when they apply to accelerator programs. This data summary includes information from 812 ventures operating in Central America, contributed by 56 accelerator programs."

"With growing interest in the confluence between effective entrepreneurship and genuine economic development, more and more accelerator programs are working to find, select and support promising entrepreneurs, especially those working in emerging markets. As these efforts accumulate, it is critical that we learn from them, so that future programs are better able to support promising emerging-market entrepreneurs.

This report focuses on an entrepreneur-support program run by TechnoServe in four Central American countries. In 2012, TechnoServe established the "Impulsa Tu Empresa" program to provide small and growing businesses (SGBs) in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua with the training, advice, market connections and access to capital they need to develop and implement promising business plans."