"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."

"This study, which is part of a larger financial performance series, provides the first comprehensive analysis of the financial performance of 55 private real assets impact investment funds in three sectors: timber, real estate, and infrastructure. The report also launches the Real Assets Impact Investing Benchmarks, which will continue to track the financial performance of impact investing funds across the three sectors; Cambridge Associates will update performance data on the benchmarks quarterly. Encouragingly, the findings show that risk-adjusted market rate returns are achievable in impact investing, as evidenced by return distributions of similar funds with no environmental or social objectives; however, fund selection remains important."

"These interactive story dashboards provide information on the lending activities to agricultural SMEs and producer organizations by the Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance (CSAF). CSAF consists of 13 private lenders that come together on a pre-competitive basis to share learning and develop industry standards to promote the healthy growth of the financial market serving small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs), including associations of smallholder farmers, in the agriculture sector."

"As part of its Agribusiness Innovation Program (AIP), infoDev designed an agribusiness incubation training program. To-date, the Agribusiness Incubation Training has been provided to a total of 149 people from 25 countries, including countries from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. This report analyzes the effects of the delivery of this training. The agribusiness incubation training sessions took place as a one-day-training1 in the context of seven different events."

"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."

"Learn about how our partners are getting sustainable returns for their business, while empowering farmers through service delivery. This report shares our most complete findings on commercially viable and impactful smallholder services."

"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."

"This report begins to address some of the communications gaps that restrict capital flows into the sustainable forestry market and seeks to uncover opportunities to unlock further investment. Investment in these vehicles is critical, both to the conservation of critical biodiversity and animal habitat and to the ability to deliver a low-carbon or negativeemission future."

"This report explores evidence and insights from five case studies that have made significant recent progress in addressing the challenge of insuring poor smallholder farmers and pastoralists in the developing world. Evidence from these case studies can inform the ongoing debate about the viability of scaling up index-based insurance for vulnerable smallholder farmers in the developing world. The rapid progress observed in recent years suggests that index insurance has the potential to benefit smallholder farmers at a meaningful scale, and suggests the need to reassess arguments that lack of demand and practical implementation challenges prevent index-based insurance from being a useful tool to reduce rural poverty."

"Smallholder farmers around the globe are facing unstable productivity due to changing climate and weather patterns. The ways in which the private sector supports these farmers to build resilience to climate change and/or engage in efforts to mitigate climate change can have significant impact on the ability for farmers to make a living, the security of supply of smallholder crops, and the reputation of the private sector actors drawing loyalty of end consumers and investors.

As part of an effort to better engage the private sector in climate smart agriculture activities the Learning Community for Supply Chain Resilience, funded by USAID's Feed the Future program and in support of the Alliance for Resilient Coffee (ARC), interviewed 18 coffee companies to better understand how they think about climate risk and climate smart agriculture, the types of activities in which they engage, and the types of climate information they use and/or need. The results of this study are supplemented by results from a case study of Ugandan coffee companies, illustrating how their use of and need for climate information differs at the national level. The results give insight into the types of information that private sector companies are looking for to be able to design and implement effective climate smart agriculture programs. It also yields some insight on information and tools that would facilitate sector-level strategies."