"This report proposes a new segmentation framework to help financial service providers, enterprises, donors, limited partners (LPs), and field-building organizations understand and navigate the complex landscape of SGB investment in frontier and emerging markets. The segmentation framework we propose uniquely integrates a number of approaches often used independently, but rarely in concert with each other. Our methodology combined perspectives from leading SGB investors on how they segment the market; analysis of enterprise-level quantitative data from multiple SGB investors; and behavioral analysis of entrepreneurs using human-centered design techniques. We focus on enterprises with five to 250 employees and financing needs ranging from $20,000 to $2 million. We include both impact-oriented and traditional, “bread-and-butter” enterprises within the scope of this study. We do not include enterprises that are informal or are unlikely to embark on a path of formalization, due to their limited growth prospects and the major difficulties financial service providers face in serving them."

"The Navigating Impact project was created by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) to help investors select impact strategies and adopt metrics that indicate performance toward their goals. Created in consultation with industry experts, impact investors, and standards setters, the Navigating Impact project provides an on-ramp to setting and streamlining impact strategies."

"The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) has provided a gender portal as part of their Navigating Impact Project. This portal collects specific strategies around measurement around various gender issues."

"The Outcomes Matrix provides a useful starting point for you to consider the social impact that you are trying to deliver and how you will measure it. This tool includes outcomes and measures for nine outcome areas and 15 beneficiary groups."

"The Middlebury Institute's Center for Social Impact Learning in partnership with SVT Group report offers a shortcut to practical information about how impact investors are tracking and reporting their social and environmental impact today. The report also includes advice from impact investors to those new to the field, and summarizes the history of impact investing, key terms and concepts in impact measurement, and trends, and provides a practical guide to the most relevant publications."

"This report seeks to illustrate common challenges that entrepreneurs and intermediating financial service providers are facing because of the coronavirus crisis, as well as various strategies being implemented by impact investors to address these challenges. Specifically, the report explores ways investors work with investees to address immediate solvency constraints, adjust their activities to ensure the achievement of impact and financial objectives, and reimagine business models and processes with the future in mind."

"This report dives into how impact investing is at an inflection point, building off the rich histories of community finance in the United States and other countries, microfinance, international development, and the integration of ESG factors (Environmental, Social and Governance) in institutional portfolios more broadly. For over 30 years, these practices have been laying the foundation for an expanded continuum of investor options for thematic and asset allocations into privately-owned investments structured for financial returns and social and environmental impacts."

"We study the causal impact of credit constraints on exporters using a natural experiment provided by two policy changes in India, first in 1998 which made small‐scale firms eligible for subsidised direct credit, and a subsequent reversal in policy in 2000 wherein some of these firms lost their eligibility. Using firms that were not affected by these policy changes as our control group in each case, we find that credit expansion increased the growth rate of bank borrowing and had a positive effect on exports. The subsequent policy reversal in 2000 had no impact on the growth rate of bank borrowing or on exports."

"This report presents a detailed analysis of impact investing activity in East Africa, examining the supply of global impact investment capital as well as the demand for investment resources from small and medium enterprises (SMEs), social enterprises, and others who aim to drive social and environmental impact through the private sector. The report covers five “focus countries” in depth: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Rwanda; and six additional countries in the region in less depth: Burundi, Sudan, South Sudan, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Somalia."

"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."