"En septiembre de 2020, la Red Aspen de Emprendedores para el Desarrollo (ANDE por sus siglas en inglés) publicó un estudio titulado “Inversión de Impacto en América Latina”, que examina las tendencias en la región durante 2018 -2019. A continuación se muestra un enfoque sobre América Central, que utiliza datos del informe completo para resaltar tendencias clave en países centroamericanos, durante este período de dos años."

"Este informe pretende captar las peculiaridades del sector de inversión de impacto en América Latina durante los dos últimos años, basándose en una muestra de los inversionistas en la región. Mediante información a nivel institucional y a nivel transacción de estos inversionistas, se ofrece un retrato de dónde y cómo se está asignando capital, e identifica los retos que enfrenta el ecosistema. Si bien abarca la región entera, el informe se enfoca en los tres mercados principales de la región: Brasil, México y Colombia."

"This supplementary guide has been created with the aim of mapping this landscape and to generate awareness and understanding of the impact space in South Africa. This guide explores why and how organisations are measuring their impact; the benefits and challenges of impact measurement and management; how impact data is used and reported; and the future of impact measurement and management in South Africa."

"The report describes the profile of acceleration and incubation programs, highlights accelerators with an impact focus, and compares accelerators in Brazil with the rest of the world. The results show that there may be a mismatch between the sectors that are of most interest to impact-oriented accelerators and to impact investors. Accelerators and investors should also think collaboratively about how to address the challenge of funding for early-stage ventures."

"The landscape of entrepreneurial support in India is quickly evolving. This report seeks to add clarity to the profile of accelerators and incubators in India - their structure, objectives, goals, funding, and the financial and non-financial support that they offer."

"In this Shell Foundation report, we share the findings from our work with leading social enterprises to build sustainable rural value chains in the off-grid energy sector over the last two decades. This report focuses on the question: can we improve the economics of social enterprises serving last mile customers to the point where they can secure sufficient investment to serve billions, not millions, of people who live on $2 to $10 a day?"

"Aid providers often describe small firms as 'job creators'. But what types of jobs do they create? Drawing on enterprise survey data for nine African countries and panel data for Ethiopia we find that small and large formal sector firms create similar numbers of net jobs. Small firms, however, have much higher turnover of employment and pay persistently lower wages. To create more 'good' jobs aid should target the constraints to the growth of firms of all sizes. Improving the 'investment climate' and new programs to increase firms' capabilities - through, for example, management training - offer greater prospects for employment creation."

"There is growing consensus that a key difference between the U.S. and developing economies is that the latter exhibit slower employment growth over the life cycle of the average business. At the same time, the rapid post entry growth in the U.S. is driven by an "up or out dynamic". We track manufacturing establishments in Colombia vs. the US and find that slower average life cycle growth in Colombia is driven by a less enthusiastic contribution of extraordinary growth plants and less dynamic selection of young underperforming plants. As a consequence, the size distribution of nonmicro plants exhibits more concentration in small-old plants in Colombia, both in unweighted and employment-weighted bases. These findings point to a shortage of high-growth entrepreneurship and a relatively high likelihood of long-run survival for small, likely unproductive plants, as two key elements at the heart of the development problem. An extreme concentration of resources in micro plants is the other distinguishing feature of the Colombian manufacturing sector vis a vis the US."

"A quantitative analysis of our portfolio covering 11 years and 160+ borrowers from around the world revealed that, on average, companies with the highest female representation in board and leadership positions outperformed those with the least. The results suggest that the percentage of women in leadership positions is especially important to financial performance. We also share practical guidance for investors on how to adopt a gender lens. As practitioners who have developed our own gender-lens strategy over the past seven years, we can speak to the confusion, the evolution, and ultimately, the rewards, of incorporating gender into investment analysis."

"This paper presents the preliminary results of our ongoing study of corrective policy intervention in cluster-based industrial development. At the center of this study is a field experiment that we are conducting in a knitwear cluster in Ha Noi (previously Ha Tay) and a rolled steal cluster in Bac Ninh in Vietnam. In these clusters, we conducted baseline surveys of firms from April to July 2010 and then provided classroom training programs for entrepreneurs in June to August of the same year. The evaluation of the training impacts is expected to reveal whether entrepreneurs in clusters possess basic knowledge of management before the training, what characterizes the entrepreneurs who are more willing and able to absorb new knowledge, whether the training can change entrepreneurs' attitudes toward learning management knowledge, how much entrepreneurs can learn from a short-period training program, and whether the benefit of the training program exceeds its cost, among others."