Theme
Investment

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"This report depicts the landscape of development organizations that fund and support small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries: 1) multilateral development banks, 2) bilateral government donor agencies, and 3) development finance institutions (DFIs). The report is a new contribution to both the development community, as well as the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE). Advocacy and policy work is a strategic priority for ANDE, and the report's findings will enable the Network to understand the international development community and to be more strategic in its approach as it seeks to influence and shape the international development SME agenda."

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"This report explores a refreshed perspective on the long term viability of impact investing and presents the "Impact Investing Roadmap" - a framework that investors can use to clarify their vision for impact investing, define stages of impact investing activities and identify tactical steps to develop an investment strategy. Those tactical steps include designing an impact investing model, managing issues of organizational change and if desired, engaging with the robust and supportive impact investing ecosystem."

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"The paper seeks to inform the reader with: An insider’s perspective of on-the-ground challenges faced in balancing the right mix of investments impact on missions of social enterprises [and] Recommendations that could help guide the growing social investment arena on how to support the development of sustainable social enterprises."

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"The study (i) reviews the definitions and concepts of social enterprises, (ii) outlines the landscape across 10 selected countries in Asia and Latin America, (iii) discusses challenges to scaling as faced by social enterprises, and (iv) presents suggestions for development banks to extend support to social enterprises through public and private sector investments. The study categorizes social enterprises and argues that the comparative advantage of development banks is to support selected social enterprises that are commercially bankable and have the base of the pyramid (BOP) at the core of their business operations. Development banks can support these enterprises-considered as the inclusive businesses of the future-through investing in impact funds and/or public sector loans."

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"SMEs are positioning themselves as a strategic branch of banking operations in the region, while banks are increasingly pushing for more active policies when it comes to the financing of SMEs. This is one of the highlighted conclusions from a 2011 joint survey conducted by the Inter-American Development Bank Group's entities dealing with the private sector: the Multilateral Investment Fund (FOMIN), the beyond Banking program of the department of Corporate and Structured Financing (SCF), and the Inter-American Investment Corporation, along with the Latin American Banking Federation (FELABAN).
This report introduces the general results obtained during the fourth survey encompassing the views and opinions of directors, managers and deputies of the SME division of 109 banks scattered across 22 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. It also includes an itemized analysis of the answers divided by the banks size and location, as well as their interrelations with other trends in that sector."

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"While the world has made huge economic gains over the past 50 years, this progress has been highly uneven. This is particularly acute in the agriculture sector, with many of the 500 million smallholder farmers around the world living on meager incomes and facing high levels of economic insecurity.

Despite some recent innovations and advances in including smallholders as market players, there have been few cases where truly widespread, market-level, transformative change towards inclusion has been achieved.

In this report, we explore the role of different kinds of capital in bending the arc of agricultural market development towards inclusive growth. We pay particular attention to how impact-focused players deploying capital that is flexible in terms of risk-return expectations can best deploy it in order to catalyze large-scale transformations towards inclusion."

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"This introductory guide is aimed at entrepreneurs and investors who are new to the process of negotiating term sheets. It is not meant to provide legal advice; instead, it is designed to provide examples of certain common provisions that are not always easy to grasp.

This guide is a thorough summary of the options for setting up a business in Mexico including the governance clauses and the differences between legal structures. It covers third party investments to raise capitals, and explains the concepts of impact investment, capital instruments and key economic terms."

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"In an effort to offer greater insight into the practice and utility of capacity building support, this report explores common forms of capacity-building support used by impact investors, many of which resemble forms of nonfinancial support historically leveraged by conventional investors. While both impact and conventional investors use capacity-building support to strengthen the underlying businesses of investee companies, impact investors also use it to enhance and extend their impact. This report outlines various needs that impact investors address through capacity-building support, the ways they structure and deliver such support, and funding strategies used for deploying such support."

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"Investors and capacity development organizations have an opportunity to support women-led small and growing businesses, but they lack information. The purpose of this collaborative research project is to provide information to capacity developers and investors who want to better understand and address the barriers to growth for women-led small and growing businesses (WSGBs)."

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"This report, the second in a collaboration between the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), outlines the latest trends in blended finance approaches in LDCs. It updates the previous 2018 report with the latest available data from the OECD, which now cover the six years from 2012 through 2017. It also features seven guest pieces by practitioners and experts working in the blended finance space, which showcase the opportunities and challenges of applying blended finance solutions in LDCs. The report concludes with a review of the next steps for the blended finance and development communities, and flags some emerging issues revealed in the report."

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