"This guide for financial and business development services providers is designed to help you, as a company or individual providing services to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), to be more gender-inclusive in your work. Applying a gender lens to your approach and offerings will, without doubt, improve your service delivery to women entrepreneurs, your own business outcomes and the communities where you work. With this guide you will learn about the benefits of targeting women entrepreneurs and women-led businesses and how to tailor products and service delivery to them. We give you step-by-step guidance for how to begin to incorporate gender-inclusive strategies into your content and delivery of services, helping you to set the foundations for better overall impact and effectiveness."

"This guide draws from Endeavor Insight’s body of research on ecosystem development and summarizes the most effective ways that stakeholders, primarily entrepreneurial support organizations and donors, can incorporate lessons into their decisions. The research utilized for this guide primarily applies to ecosystems involving tech-enabled sectors and high-impact entrepreneurs, i.e. those who lead growth oriented, investment-seeking businesses. Still, many of the findings may also apply to a wider range of contexts."

"Emissions reporting is the first, and arguably one of the most important steps you can take to reduce your company’s footprint. This will help you identify where you need to take action to reduce your emissions. Once you know what the problem is and where the most intense
areas of emissions are, you can create a strategy to cut your greenhouse gas emissions and potentially save money for your business."

"A significant proportion of the world’s businesses are small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Globally, micro-enterprises (SMEs with fewer than ten employees) alone account for 70% to 90% of all firms. As such, SMEs play an important role in reducing global emissions and bringing innovative climate solutions to the market. It is crucial that they are equipped with the tools and resources needed to measure their emissions, set greenhouse gas reduction targets grounded in science, take bold actions, report on their progress and ultimately reduce their emissions. This framework provides guidelines for SMEs on doing exactly that. It is open for anyone to use and can be used directly by SMEs to guide their reporting of climate impacts and strategies to multiple stakeholders. It can also be used by SME support organizations (such as consultancies) and data collectors to guide SMEs in climate disclosure."

"This is an interactive resource designed to equip you with the knowledge and strategies required to meet the needs of women entrepreneurs. This handbook can be applied in the context of a women-only programme or to better support women founders within a mixed gender programme. We recognise that gender is not binary and so depending on the context, you may choose to use this handbook as a guide to reflect on how to make your programme more accessible, inclusive and equitable for other genders as well."

"In 2018, the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), with the support of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), launched the Gender Lens Impact Measurement (GLIM) Fund to enhance the awareness, rigor, and quality of impact measurement for organizations supporting entrepreneurs with a gender lens approach. Each grant from the fund went to a partnership between small and growing business (SGB) support organizations in Latin America and researchers to use measurement for driving improved gender-inclusive strategies. This synthesis report summarises the tools and lessons from these grants on using measurement to increase gender inclusion for SGB support organizations."

"The toolkit is provided for all intermediaries and enterprise support organizations – regardless of size, geography or sector – who want proactively to support SGBs within their portfolio to integrate OHS and employment minimum practices. The toolkit aims at equipping intermediaries with the necessary tools, knowledge and resources to broach the safe working environment and fair employee treatment subject, and enables the intermediaries to assess, design and structure possible solutions for their SGB clients."

Currently there are over 500 townships in the South Africa, whose combined land mass surpasses that of Johannesburg and Durban combined and which are home to an estimated 40% of South Africa’s urban population. While more is understood about the small and growing businesses (SGBs) in metropolitan areas, less is known about the entrepreneurial ecosystems in the townships and how to support the primarily micro, necessity-based businesses that operate there. This report focuses on identifying the key actors implementing programmes to support entrepreneurs and small businesses operating in townships in the Eastern Cape, Gauteng, and Western Cape Provinces, the challenges the entrepreneurial support providers face, and the opportunities to strengthen this ecosystem.

As investors with experience in gender lens investing (GLI), our peers often ask us for information on how to start their GLI journey. Many useful resources are available to do this. However, this brief addresses a gap in information on the tools and approaches used to design and implement gender-smart technical assistance for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to improve their social and financial performance. We also share our reflections from our collective experience to date.

To understand the network’s current level of support for climate entrepreneurship, ANDE identified which of its members work in climate adaptation, mitigation, and resilience and mapped where and how this support is being provided. Data were collected between March and August 2021 through a survey of ANDE’s member organizations as well as supplementary desk research. While the analysis in this snapshot is static, the information is meant to serve as a catalyst for greater climate action in the SGB sector.