"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. SGBs will have to confront climate and environmental changes such as extreme weather and rapidly depleting natural resources as they affect their customers, operations, and supply chains. In light of these changes, this issue brief lays out the major environmental action topics and strategies for the SGB sector."

"The report will address a number of specific steps that asset owners, asset managers, banks and other players, such as consultants and advisors should consider taking towards reversing climate change. These vary between institutions, but consistent themes include: developing investment beliefs, strengthening governance and risk management, working with clients to develop investment strategies, engaging with other financial institutions and nonfinancial companies. Above all, it is vital for financial institutions to understand that addressing stranding risks and other financial risks and opportunities of climate change is not a one-off process. It needs to become a permanent part of everyday decision-making."

"The authors conduct a randomized experiment among women in urban Sri Lanka to measure the impact of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business program. They work with two representative groups of women: a random sample of women operating subsistence enterprises and a random sample of women who are out of the labor force but interested in starting a business. They track the impacts of two treatments -- training only and training plus a cash grant -- over two years with four follow-up surveys and find that the short and medium-term impacts differ."

"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 This shift, which persists and strengthens after assistance is withdrawn, leads to a 38% increase in earnings.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."

"While private sector engagement has long been a part of the global development lexicon, it is taking on new meaning today. Multinational and large national corporations actively shaped the SDGs and are contributing to global development in new and exciting ways. Meanwhile, social enterprises are becoming a critical part of the development ecosystem with their innovative approaches to global development challenges and new market-based solutions.

This special Devex report sheds a light on the relationship between social entrepreneurs and donors, and offers recommendations on what can be done to further strengthen those relationships."

"In this report we study the impacts of giving cash grants of approximately $150 and basic business skills training to the very poorest and most excluded women in a war-affected region, northern Uganda. The program was designed and implemented by an Italian non-governmental organization (NGO), AVSI Uganda, with decades of experience serving this population."

"Do business accelerators add value? If so, how? We investigate these questions by focusing on Start-Up Chile, a government-backed ecosystem accelerator. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that entrepreneurship-schooling services of accelerators can significantly increase new venture performance by improving the entrepreneurial capital of participants. We speculate about the existence of four performance-enhancing mechanisms: greater social clout, the provision of an accountability structure that induces entrepreneurs to articulate and reflect about specific strategic tasks, an increase in self-efficacy, and know-how about building a start-up. We find no support for causal effects of basic services of cash and co-working space."

"This report describes the landscape of business incubators and accelerators in the UK, exploring the scale and distribution, both geographically and sectorally."