"Impact investment is a strategy to align the power of private markets to the social and environmental development needs of society at-large. From 2012-13, the Rockefeller Foundation, through its Impact Investing initiative, funded research in five Sub-Saharan African countries with the aim of understanding the barriers for impact investing across Africa, as well as recommending national policies to encourage the growth of the industry. This report synthesises the findings of that work, presents three frameworks, and examines the potential of impact investing as a 'strategy of choice' for African policymakers."

"From launching a fund to exiting investments, this handbook provides an introduction to equity investment throughout Africa. The handbook presents a panorama of SGB investment in Africa, introduces equity investment methodology, and suggests a roadmap for launching an investment vehicle targeting African SGBs."

"ANGIN Team is glad to share some of the latest insights on this investing in impact landscape in Indonesia. For the first report of this kind, our research and investment team analyzed hundreds of transactions and deep dived into investor case studies to extract some of the key trends shaping the market."

"This report from the CSIS Project on Prosperity and Development outlines a new tool for policymakers to encourage private-sector development in developing nations. Specifically, it argues that in fragile states there is an intermediation gap between sources of capital and entrepreneurs seeking investment. This gap prevents investment by raising transaction costs and exacerbating information asymmetry. Cusack and Tilleard present a case study of this gap as observed in their work in South Sudan. Then they propose a model of investment facilitation that bridges the intermediation gap. The model is based on donor funding of a neutral nongovernment facilitator to identify attractive investment opportunities, link them to capital, and facilitate transactions."

"This report is based upon discussions that took place during the webinar “Farmer and FInance: The Widening Gap”, which focused on the challenges and opportunities smallholder farmers face in accessing finance. The event was a virtual roundtable discussion with the participation of companies that work with smallholder farmers. Beyond financing, this report examines other challenges in working with smallholders who are part of large-scale agricultural value chains, based on the outcomes of the event and individual interviews with Business Call to Action member companies."

"This study conducts a comparative analysis of social enterprise intermediaries in China and India to better understand how they legitimize social enterprises in new settings. To address theoretical weakness in this sphere, it combines several institutional theories to capture disruptions created by institutional innovation and also legitimizing processes. Drawing on data collected from surveys, interviews, and websites in each country, it finds that intermediaries mitigate negative and leverage positive influences of external institutions though their strategies vary due to country differences in institutional pressures. This information is key to building intermediaries' capacity to institutionalize social enterprises as new institutional actors."

"The Government has put high-growth, innovative businesses at the heart of its economic agenda, and is focusing policy on how to back the big businesses of tomorrow. The aim of this research was to provide: "a thorough and focused literature review on business incubation." The purpose of which was to identify models of incubation that have the greatest impact on the mission of building high-growth, innovative firms."

"A growing wave of co-location programmes promises to boost growth for entrepreneurs and young firms. Despite great public and policy interest we have little idea whether such programmes are effective. This paper categorises accelerators and incubators within a larger family of co-location interventions. We then develop a single framework to theorise workspace-level impacts. We summarise available evaluation evidence and sketch implications for regional economic policy. We find clear evidence programmes are effective overall. But we know little about how effects operate - or who benefits. Providers and policymakers should experiment further to establish optimal designs."

"Our new study builds on Dalberg's 2012 "Catalyzing Smallholder Agricultural Finance". It provides a sophisticated picture of how the smallholder finance space currently operates by describing the key actors and the nature of their interactions, and conceptualizing these in a new "industry model." The study identifies market frictions across the major components of the “industry model” that continue to inhibit smallholder farmers’ access to financial services and opportunities for removing them, and rallies sector actors around the need for more collective action than ever before."

"We mailed brochures to 10,000 randomly chosen employed German workers eligible for a subsidized occupational training program called WeGebAU, informing them about the importance of skill-upgrading occupational training in general and about WeGebAU in particular. Using survey and register data, we estimate effects of the information treatment brochure on awareness of the program, on take-up of WeGebAU and other training, and on subsequent employment. The brochure more than doubles awareness of the program. There are no effects on WeGebAU take-up but participation in other (unsubsidized) training increases among employees aged below 45. Short-term labor market outcomes are not affected."