"This publication focuses on the specifics of impact investing in financial inclusion and fintechs. It begins with an overview of the social and economic context in Brazil, which is followed by data on impact investing in the sector taken from the second edition of the report "The Impact Investing Landscape in Latin America", recently published by ANDE and LAVCA (The Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America). The publication then presents a case study of a business that received investment, before concluding with recommendations for the future."

"Learn about how our partners are getting sustainable returns for their business, while empowering farmers through service delivery. This report shares our most complete findings on commercially viable and impactful smallholder services."

"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."

"This report highlights the potential of small, micro and medium enterprises (SMME) in the process of moving towards a green economy in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It also describes challenges that SMME with inclusive business models face and provides policy recommendations on how to support them."

"Despite regulatory efforts designed to make it easier for firms to formalize, informality remains extremely high among firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. In most of the region, business registration in a national registry is separate from tax registration. This paper provides initial results from an experiment in Malawi that randomly allocated firms into a control group and three treatment groups: a) a group offered assistance for costless business registration; b) a group offered assistance with costless business registration and (separate) tax registration; and c) a group offered assistance for costless business registration along with an information session at a bank that ended with the offer of business bank accounts. The study finds that all three treatments had extremely large impacts on business registration, with 75 percent of those offered assistance receiving a business registration certificate. The findings offer a cost-effective way of getting firms to formalize in this dimension. However, in common with other studies, information and assistance has a limited impact on tax registration. The paper measures the short-term impacts of formalization on financial access and usage. Business registration alone has no impact for either men or women on bank account usage, savings, or credit. However, the combination of formalization assistance and the bank information session results in significant impacts on having a business bank account, financial practices, savings, and use of complementary financial products."

"Identifying the determinants of entrepreneurship is an important research and policy goal, especially in emerging market economies where lack of capital and supporting infrastructure often imposes stringent constraints on business growth. This paper studies the impact of a comprehensive business and financial literacy program on firm outcomes of young entrepreneurs in an emerging post-conflict economy, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The authors conduct a randomized control trial and find that while the training program did not influence business survival, it significantly improved business practices, investments, and loan terms for surviving businesses. Entrepreneurs with higher ex-ante financial literacy further exhibited some improvements in business performance and sales."

"This whitepaper presents the first rigorous analysis and estimate of the size of the impact investing market. It estimates that over 1,340 organizations currently manage USD 502 billion in impact investing assets worldwide. This research also underscores the diversity of the market.

Overall, this research indicates that a significant amount of capital is at work to address the world's social and environmental challenges. And the market continues to grow rapidly, with new investors entering to establish impact investing practices and to allocate additional capital to positive impact."

"As microenterprises are likely to resort to microfinance institutions to get access to financial services, Appui au Developpement Autonome (ADA) has coordinated a series of three studies relying on five Monetary Financing Institutions (MFIs) in Ethiopia, Kenya and Madagascar in order to identify a sample of SGB owners and interview them individually to get details about their paths.

This study is the synthesis of these three surveys and specifically aims at providing detailed information about entrepreneurs' profiles, about the main challenges and obstacles they faced through their growing process and about their current financial and non-financial needs. Based on such information, general recommendations are made to financial services providers and all kinds of organizations supporting MSMEs."

"Resources to validate new sanitation technologies and prepare for market entry – prerequisites for achieving sustainable, scaled solutions – tend to be quite scarce compared to those available to scale proven solutions. As such, a problematic ‘Pioneer Gap’ exists. This funder landscape seeks to both clarify the ‘Pioneer Gap’ and point readers to potential funding and other resources poised to help fill this problematic gap. Two promising forms of funding are explored in detail: catalytic philanthropy and blended finance leveraging impact investment."

"The report seeks to explore how to improve the scalability and viability of early-stage finance provision, thereby reducing the need for philanthropic capital and subsidies to the local providers of finance and support to early-stage enterprises. To this end, the Dutch Good Growth Fund used a landscape exercise to define and prioritize "archetypes of early-stage finance provision" as the focus of this report.

They discussed their initial findings from the in-depth research with 40 field-builders in a workshop during which participants shared experiences, insights and perspectives, and helped to challenge emerging conclusions and identify key points of attention to address in finalizing the report."