"This guide concerns smallholder farmers and their engagement with markets in Africa. It looks at their degree of engagement as well as the possibilities to link them to formal firms in ways that may improve access to capital, inputs, know-how and markets. It adopts three perspectives to frame thinking about key issues: agricultural development policy, rural market failures and a 'business view', the latter with regards to high start-up costs and learning thresholds."

"The Shell Foundation commissioned Enclude and the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) to conduct research on how to spur significant scaling up of investment in and reach to SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa over the coming three to five years. This study is based on research conducted from late 2016 to mid-2017, with generous participation from leading providers of SME finance globally through roundtable discussions, surveys and interviews. The findings in this report highlight both individual approaches and systemic interventions necessary to achieve significant scale."

"This paper seeks to outline the social enterprise landscape in Ghana. It reviews the enabling environment and the scope of capacity-building activities supporting social enterprise to provide an overview of the profile of existing social enterprises and social innovation activity. It presents information on perceptions and levels of awareness of social enterprise, the obstacles and challenges faced and opportunities to improve the enabling environment; and lessons from social enterprise activities in other national contexts. It should be noted that the study is not, and did not set out to be a comprehensive review of all social enterprises and support organisation in Ghana."

"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 study estimates that social enterprises could create more than 1 million additional jobs by 2030 in the 12 focus countries that have been analyzed. Overall, this would result in a total of approximately 5.5 million direct jobs in social enterprises in 2030. These jobs would be created in existing markets, but also for new markets, thus creating new value chains and many more indirect income opportunities in these countries. The implementation of the interventions recommended in this report are thus an important action to prepare the African continent on future demographic dynamics. In addition, they can also be seen as an important contribution to preserve jobs that have been put at risk because of COVID-19."

"Despite regulatory efforts designed to make it easier for firms to formalize, informality remains extremely high among firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. In most of the region, business registration in a national registry is separate from tax registration. This paper provides initial results from an experiment in Malawi that randomly allocated firms into a control group and three treatment groups: a) a group offered assistance for costless business registration; b) a group offered assistance with costless business registration and (separate) tax registration; and c) a group offered assistance for costless business registration along with an information session at a bank that ended with the offer of business bank accounts. The study finds that all three treatments had extremely large impacts on business registration, with 75 percent of those offered assistance receiving a business registration certificate. The findings offer a cost-effective way of getting firms to formalize in this dimension. However, in common with other studies, information and assistance has a limited impact on tax registration. The paper measures the short-term impacts of formalization on financial access and usage. Business registration alone has no impact for either men or women on bank account usage, savings, or credit. However, the combination of formalization assistance and the bank information session results in significant impacts on having a business bank account, financial practices, savings, and use of complementary financial products."

"As microenterprises are likely to resort to microfinance institutions to get access to financial services, Appui au Developpement Autonome (ADA) has coordinated a series of three studies relying on five Monetary Financing Institutions (MFIs) in Ethiopia, Kenya and Madagascar in order to identify a sample of SGB owners and interview them individually to get details about their paths.

This study is the synthesis of these three surveys and specifically aims at providing detailed information about entrepreneurs' profiles, about the main challenges and obstacles they faced through their growing process and about their current financial and non-financial needs. Based on such information, general recommendations are made to financial services providers and all kinds of organizations supporting MSMEs."

"In cooperation with various financing partners, Make-IT publishes guides to investment in Kenya and Nigeria explaining funding instruments, investor types and the different stages of raising capital. In addition, they give a brief overview of the specific investment scene. The guides also contain of a detailed investor directory giving detailed information on more than 60 investors and financing partners."

"Resources to validate new sanitation technologies and prepare for market entry – prerequisites for achieving sustainable, scaled solutions – tend to be quite scarce compared to those available to scale proven solutions. As such, a problematic ‘Pioneer Gap’ exists. This funder landscape seeks to both clarify the ‘Pioneer Gap’ and point readers to potential funding and other resources poised to help fill this problematic gap. Two promising forms of funding are explored in detail: catalytic philanthropy and blended finance leveraging impact investment."

"In cooperation with various financing partners Make-IT publishes guides to investment in Kenya and Nigeria explaining funding instruments, investor types and the different stages of raising capital. In addition, they give a brief overview of the specific investment scene. The guides also contain of a detailed investor directory giving detailed information on more than 60 investors and financing partners."