"This report was published as part of an interest in expanding knowledge and contribution to create a more enabling environment for inclusive business. The intentions of this are: firstly, to illustrate how the consideration of BoP communities exclusively through their income levels is limiting and can be misleading for practitioners; and secondly, to develop a series of recommendations to governments and public institutions on how to create an enabling environment for inclusive business models."

"Solar Sister, a social enterprise operating in Tanzania, Uganda, and Nigeria, is dedicated to eradicating energy poverty through the economic empowerment of women. In addition to economically empowering its women entrepreneurs, the business model of Solar Sister also cultivates sales networks built on trust in last-mile distribution methods. While Solar Sister has previously conducted research regarding its many entrepreneurs, it has lacked information on its end customers. In 2016 a research team from Santa Clara University’s Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship undertook survey research with Solar Sister to examine the effects of solar lantern use on users’ health, education, time allocation, household savings, income generation, and increased agency. The research team conducted a 53-question survey in more than 20 villages across five regions in Tanzania, with research assistants providing English-Swahili translation. The data and stories presented here are intended to help illuminate the potential of solar lanterns to improve livelihoods in rural Tanzania and beyond."

"Fintech recently became the most-active sector for startup investment in the Middle East and North Africa. While much of the media coverage has focused on digital payments and e-commerce, this report will highlight fintech innovation that is improving "financial health" for the region's most marginalized communities: tech that helps people manage their income and expenses, weather financial shocks and plan for a healthy financial future."

"In light of the recent changes to the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment codes, this research study seeks to understand how corporations in South Africa are approaching enterprise development. The research aims to shed light on enterprise development practices across South Africa’s corporate arena and to highlight areas of strength and innovation, as well as core challenge areas. The ultimate goal of this research is to drive more effective and impactful enterprise development practices. It aims to promote practices not only geared towards small business development and job creation, but also sustainable, values-based practices that enable transformative, socio-economically inclusive and environmentally friendly outcomes."

"A study from Zeppelin University and Siemens Stiftung provides for the first time data that evaluates the ability of social enterprises to satisfy the basic needs of poor populations. Focusing on Colombia, Mexico, Kenya and South Africa, the dynamics in the public, private, and third sectors were examined, and to what extent these influence the activities of social enterprises. The study includes concrete recommendations on how to increase the contribution of social enterprises to poverty alleviation."

"This paper provides a review of the profiles of the subsistence entrepreneurs and their constraints, and the landscape of current entrepreneurship programs and the evidence on impacts, and discusses the potential role of public policies for the livelihoods of subsistence entrepreneurs. Worldwide over a half of workers are self-employed, but a significant fraction of these self-employed jobs are of low productivity subsistence entrepreneurs. The focus of the entrepreneurship programs to support these self-employed in poverty is to improve their livelihoods rather than promoting cutting-edge innovation and business growth. Evidence of successful programs is limited and program designs often seem ill suited to the needs and characteristics of these subsistence entrepreneurs. Given the market failures faced by subsistence entrepreneurs, interventions that complement safety net programs with well-targeted support to promote productive self-employment may hold some promise."

"Humanitarian aid is insufficient to support the unprecedented numbers of fellow human beings who are struggling as refugees, migrants, or modern-day slaves. In this Social Entrepreneurship at the Margins report, Miller Center illustrates the clear and urgent need for bottom-up, enterprise level approaches, and highlights organizations that are already addressing the needs of these groups in innovative ways. This report highlights the efforts of Refugee Investment Network (RIN) and other innovators to bridge these gaps and invites other stakeholders to collaboratively build sustainable solutions for the growing global challenges facing refugees, migrants, and human trafficking survivors."

"The current global crisis of economic exclusion and inequity has millions of people in poverty with limited opportunities to escape. The questions of how markets work, and who they work for, have never been more pressing.

Truly inclusive markets lead to expanded opportunity for more broadly shared prosperity, especially for those facing the greatest barriers. With support from The Rockefeller Foundation, we analyzed historical cases where such inclusive transformations actually occurred in order to understand the ways in which they were achieved. Using these insights, we offer practical recommendations for funders and intermediaries seeking to enable more of these shifts in the future."

"Enterprises seeking to achieve both impact and financial returns have worked hard for many years to deliver critical goods and services to those living at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). While these efforts have clearly had tremendous impact helping large numbers of very poor people, it remains unclear how deeply down into the BOP we as a field are reaching.

Are these enterprises consistently reaching people living on $8 a day? How about $4, or $2, or less? Given the lack of good data, we really do not know. And yet we need to. In order to understand how to reach deeply down the pyramid, we need to understand who is successfully doing so. In order to know when we should subsidize for-profit enterprises to get them to reach lower, we need a better understanding of the “natural” limits to their current reach.

This report was developed jointly by Monitor Deloitte, the MacArthur Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Rockefeller Foundation to help provide transparency and guidance to advance the broader field of funding for businesses serving the deep BOP."

"The Poverty Probability Index (PPI) is a comprehensive, contextually-sensitive poverty measurement tool to characterize households' asset ownership and probability of living below the poverty line. The PPI questionnaires are available for individual countries and are continuously updated."