"This report reflects a combination of on-the-ground experiences of China Impact Fund (CIF) and New Ventures China (NVC), and points of view from emerging impact investing practitioners active in mainland China. It aims to consider the important but often overlooked role of impact investing in the potential transformation of China's society over the coming decades, especially on the environmental front."

"Rabobank Foundation, AgriProFocus and ICCO Cooperation offer support to agri-food SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa in overcoming some of the most important hurdles to growth and development...The study increases our understanding of the challenges faced by agri-food SMEs as well as those faced by investors and capital funds operating in Sub-Saharan Africa. We trust that this report challenges regulators, donors and potential investors to come up with novel approaches for making critical capital available to agri-food SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa."

"This paper examines the sparse but rapidly growing literature on Business (and Seed) Accelerators. It summarises the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) that have been identified by academic authors, and matches each factor to operational and strategic activity within an Accelerator and to theoretical arguments for and against their importance. The aim is to match CSFs with literature from a wider range of disciplines, particularly psychology, sociology, economics, leadership and learning. These each help explain, justify, inform and give a theoretical context to the documented CSFs. The background models, once identified, are useful tools in the planning and analysis of Accelerators."

"In recent years, accelerator programs experienced substantial growth, becoming an important part of the entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world. New ventures that want to participate in such programs must go through a multi-stage and highly competitive process, with only one out of ten applicants being successful. However, our knowledge with regards to the factors that drive the decisions of accelerator programs is limited, and empirical research on this topic is scarce. We hypothesise that the national culture of the founding team can play an important role as a proxy for the unobservable values and the behaviour of the venture founders, and we examine the impact of cultural diversity on the probability of being admitted into an accelerator program. The results show that diversity enhances the probability of being selected. This finding is robust across several specifications, and while accounting for the potential endogeneity of cultural diversity."

"This issue brief, part of a series published by ANDE in 2019, is designed to create a common knowledge base from which the Small and Growing Business (SGB) sector can work in the hopes of advancing towards selected development goals. This brief explains how SGB support organizations can help achieve SDG 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth, through the examination of SGBs as job creators in emerging markets, SGBs as drivers of economic growth in emerging markets, and SGBs and the changing nature of work."

"This report shows that the historic Paris Agreement on climate change that has recently come into force will help to open up nearly $23 trillion in opportunities for climate-smart investments in certain emerging markets between now and 2030. Based on the national climate-change commitments and underlying policies of 21 emerging-market economies, representing 48 percent of global emissions, it identifies sectors in each region with the greatest potential for investment—from climate resilient infrastructure in South Asia to clean energy in Africa."

"During the five-year period 2012-2017 we ran the Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD), we learned many lessons that we hope other accelerators can benefit from to increase their own effectiveness. This paper describes that learning journey through our top ten lessons."

"The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of agricultural labor and into running small businesses. This shift, which persists and strengthens after assistance is withdrawn, leads to a 38% increase in earnings. Inculcating basic entrepreneurship, where severely disadvantaged women take on occupations which were the preserve of non-poor women, is shown to be a powerful means of transforming the economic lives of the poor."

"Business training is a widely used development tool, yet little is known about its impact. We study the effects of such a business training program held in Central America. To deal with endogenous selection into the training program, we use a regression discontinuity design, exploiting the fact that a fixed number of applicants are taken into the training program based on a pre-training score. Business training significantly increases the probability that an applicant to the workshop starts a business or expands an existing business. Results also suggest gender heterogeneity as well as the presence of financial constraints."

"This article examines the performance of a poverty alleviation policy in Thailand known as the Small and Micro Community Enterprises (SMCEs) programme. It investigates provincial determinants affecting the establishments of the SMCEs and assesses the effects of the programme on household income and out-migration by using panel data analysis and propensity score matching model. The research findings indicated that such enterprises have spread widely. Average household expenditure, the rate of poverty, and agricultural output were significant predictors of SMCE establishments. However, the research did not find any concrete evidence to support the claim that this policy helped reduce poverty or out-migration."