This report by This is Africa surveyed European and US limited partners, such as pension funds and insurance companies, to explore their views on emerging markets and socially responsible investing (SRI). While 65% of investors allocate to emerging markets, less than 30% target Africa-focused funds, with many deterred by concerns over governance, transparency, and political risk. Opinions on investing in Africa are split. The report reveals a limited understanding of SRI. Only 39% of investors monitor social impact, and 60% see SRI as merely excluding unethical investments rather than actively driving change. Impact investing is poorly understood, with just 32% familiar with the concept. Though 25% would accept lower returns for proven social benefits, most investors remain skeptical due to insufficient data. This report aims to highlight these gaps in knowledge and encourage further discussion.

The report by the Enrich in Africa Center (EiA-C) highlights the importance of funding innovation ecosystems in Africa to develop scalable solutions for local challenges. It analyzes grant funding data from 2020 to 2023, focusing on the nine largest funders active in Africa, and incorporates insights from interviews with key stakeholders. The report examines both the overall innovation funding landscape and specific funding for ecosystem support activities and organizations. It aims to equip funders and recipients with the necessary data and insights to create sustainable and impactful innovation ecosystems across Africa. EiA-C plays a pivotal role in bridging the gap between funders and recipients by fostering connections and sharing knowledge within the ecosystem.

In order to influence the UK government and global policymakers to fulfill their commitments to women and girls and women’s economic justice, the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and CARE International UK collaborated, with support from the Ares Charitable Foundation, to explore solutions for overcoming inequalities in unpaid care, and share how building caring economies can foster women’s entrepreneurship and economic justice. This joint paper outlines successful interventions to build caring economies in line with the feminist concept of the “5 Rs” of Recognition, Reduction, Redistribution, Representation and Reward for care work. Interventions include increasing care provision; investment in care and social services; focusing on care across the broad spectrum of caring needs – from disability care to elderly care and childcare; redistributing care work at the household level through social norms change; and driving economic transformation that changes laws, structures and economies, with carers, women in all their diversity, and girls leading the way.

In Extrapolations, Mumbai in 2059 is depicted as a dystopian city where climate change forces all commerce to take place at night, with people relying on oxygen stations to survive the extreme heat. This grim vision highlights the severe consequences of unchecked climate change, underscoring the importance of climate adaptation. Effective adaptation should focus on maintaining quality of life, which requires urgent investment in adaptation strategies today. The report shifts focus towards adaptation finance, challenging the idea that it is solely a public good with little role for private sector investment. While continuing to emphasize climate mitigation, the report identifies areas where adaptation investments can yield both positive impacts and financial returns. It stresses that addressing climate change is not only crucial for the planet but also presents significant business opportunities. The choices made in the next decade will be critical, requiring unprecedented capital to scale effective solutions.

The report highlights the growing importance of social procurement in achieving sustainability and social impact across various sectors. Industrial manufacturers focus on community empowerment through education, healthcare, and environmental sustainability, while conglomerates and FMCG companies support local vendors and SMEs to drive economic growth. IT companies prioritize green procurement to reduce environmental impacts, and the banking sector promotes financial inclusion through programs for marginalized groups. Pharmaceutical companies emphasize responsible sourcing and supplier diversity, and automotive companies adopt sustainable supply chain practices to mitigate environmental impacts. To accelerate social procurement, the report identifies the need for leadership-driven strategies to allocate procurement to social enterprises, capacity-building initiatives, stronger platforms for connecting social enterprises with corporate buyers, and policy incentives in India. These efforts aim to enhance the social procurement ecosystem and foster long-term social and economic benefits.

"In this paper, we argue that business models need to be inclusive and adaptive to generate climate-smart value equitably for all stakeholders involved and sustainably over time. Inclusivity involves not only providing the poor at the Bottom-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) with access to resources (e.g. finance, technology, access to markets) in business models but also, according to some scholars, with guaranteeing their representation in decision-making over the use of these resources. Adaptability entails the capacity to smoohtly adjust structures and processes of enterprise-BoP partnerships that underlie business models. We suggest that building inclusive and adaptive climate-smart business models is non-trivial work which, in the future, will require rapid cycles of collective experimentation and reflection between decision-makers in climate-smart business models and researchers studying them."

"Microfinance institutions (MFIs) must balance financial and social goals. When these coopetitive goals are under threat, which goals do MFIs prefer? Based on the theory of myopic loss aversion, our study aims to assess the immediate effect of the 2016 demonetization in India on MFIs and their loan portfolio performance and on unintended social outcomes. Using the 2016 demonetization in India as a quasi-experiment, we find that MFIs had a lower 30-day and 90-day portfolio at risk (PAR) and implemented better client protection terms. In addition, demonetization had a small but positive effect on developing start-up enterprises and serving more clients below the poverty line. Last, we find that MFIs investing in female client education presented a lower PAR after demonetization. Overall, our study sheds light on the unintended consequences on MFIs as a result of the demonetization event, and it provides policy implications for MFIs."

"We make a comparison of microfinance banks (MBs) and commercial banks (CBs) in terms of efficiency, business orientation, stability, and asset quality by analyzing a large sample of banks from 60 countries around the world. Our findings indicate that microfinance banks have higher intermediation, non-interest income, wholesale funding and liquidity, but lower efficiency and asset quality. These significant variations are influenced by smaller microfinance banks and are driven mostly to African and Latin American microfinance banks."

"Microfinance has gained significant attention as a social innovation, offering flexible and low-cost financial services to households who are otherwise excluded from formal financial services. Over the years, numerous research works have expanded the knowledge base of microfinance. Applying bibliometrics, we summarise findings from 1599 articles published between 1987 and 2022. Our performance analysis reveals insights into the research trend, including its geographical distribution, the theories under examination, and the most influential publications. More importantly, the knowledge foundation and thematic analysis categorize microfinance research into three broad themes, viz. impact of microfinance, management of microfinance and performance and efficiency of microfinance."

"The past decade has witnessed a surge of research interest in social entrepreneurship (SE). This has resulted in important insights concerning the role of SE in fostering inclusive growth and institutional change. However, the rapid growth of SE research, the emerging nature of the literature, and the fact that SE builds on different disciplines and fields (e.g., entrepreneurship, sociology, economics, ethics) have led to a rather fragmented literature without dominant frameworks. This situation risks leading to a duplication of efforts and hampers cumulative knowledge growth. Drawing on 395 peer-reviewed articles on SE, we (1) identify gaps in SE research on three levels of analysis (i.e., individual, organizational, institutional), (2) proffer an integrative multistage, multilevel framework, and (3) discuss promising avenues for further research on SE."