"Developed in partnership with ASEAN, this report discusses labour market participation of women and women’s entrepreneurship in the ASEAN region today. It takes stock of key challenges women are facing, analyses the policy landscape, identifies gaps, and proposes recommendations to advance the role of women in the labour market, as entrepreneurs and business owners, presenting best practice examples from both the region and the OECD."

"This paper studies the impact on well-being and business outcomes from teaching stress-management practices to small firm owners in Bangladesh. Female owners were randomly assigned either to a treatment group that received a 10-week Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) course featuring priority-setting and relaxation techniques, or to a control group exposed to Empathic Listening. CBT leads to large initial reductions in owner stress, but no initial increase in firm profits. Six months after receiving CBT, owners in sectors with a low concentration of women show large and significant effects on stress, and their firms show increased profits. By contrast, owners in female-dominated sectors experience a short-lived reduction in stress, and firms show no changes in profits. The large post-treatment differences in well-being and profits between industries suggest that the ability to manage stress is malleable, and that industry choice proxies for traits that are strongly correlated with returns to training."

"The aim of this study is to explore how an accelerator could succeed. We found that fundamental preconditions for success might be the access to relevant business competences and the ability to transfer it to a startup. On the other hand, the dynamics of acceleration organisation might be a restricting factor for business knowledge use and action. The success of an accelerator is a multidimensional topic. Generally, accelerators should construct great value proposition that facilitates the generation of long-term attraction for different stakeholders. However, the access to knowledge and funding can be viewed as the prerequisites of the existence of an accelerator but a prevailing startup ecosystem and service providers can also have a significant influence on new venture creation. Generally, the success of an accelerator can improve a local startup ecosystem and might have an influence on the economic development of a region."

"Measurement practices are rapidly evolving in the small and growing business (SGB) sector, and organizations operating in this space may feel overwhelmed while trying to keep up with trends and best practices. To better understand measurement practices in the SGB sector and to help organizations benchmark themselves against their peers, ANDE surveyed 30 members about their measurement practices as a follow-up to our 2014 paper."

"The Shell Foundation commissioned Enclude and the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) to conduct research on how to spur significant scaling up of investment in and reach to SMEs in Sub-Saharan Africa over the coming three to five years. This study is based on research conducted from late 2016 to mid-2017, with generous participation from leading providers of SME finance globally through roundtable discussions, surveys and interviews. The findings in this report highlight both individual approaches and systemic interventions necessary to achieve significant scale."

"How do different sources of social influence impact the likelihood of entrepreneurship? We examine this question in the setting of an entrepreneurship class in which students were randomly assigned to receive mentorship from either an entrepreneur or a non-entrepreneur. Using a longitudinal field experiment with a pre-test/post-test design, we find that randomization to an entrepreneur mentor increases the likelihood of entrepreneurial careers, particularly for students whose parents were not entrepreneurs. Additional analysis shows the mentor influences the decision to join an early-stage venture, but not to become a founder. Performance data suggests that entrepreneurial influence is not encouraging "worse" entrepreneurship and may have helped students in joining or founding better-performing ventures. We contribute to the literature on social influence in entrepreneurship by examining the interaction between multiple sources of social influence and by using a randomized field experiment to overcome the endogenous process of tie formation."

"This SIGI Regional Report on Latin America and the Caribbean highlights the positive strides, commitments and momentum to challenge gender-based discrimination in social institutions, notably in land, property and financial rights, and in legal reforms to eliminate gender-based violence."

"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."

"Enterprises seeking to achieve both impact and financial returns have worked hard for many years to deliver critical goods and services to those living at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP). While these efforts have clearly had tremendous impact helping large numbers of very poor people, it remains unclear how deeply down into the BOP we as a field are reaching.

Are these enterprises consistently reaching people living on $8 a day? How about $4, or $2, or less? Given the lack of good data, we really do not know. And yet we need to. In order to understand how to reach deeply down the pyramid, we need to understand who is successfully doing so. In order to know when we should subsidize for-profit enterprises to get them to reach lower, we need a better understanding of the “natural” limits to their current reach.

This report was developed jointly by Monitor Deloitte, the MacArthur Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Rockefeller Foundation to help provide transparency and guidance to advance the broader field of funding for businesses serving the deep BOP."

"This document answers questions through a practical self-assessment tool built from the collective knowledge of practitioners who have been engaged in scaling social businesses. It is a simple checklist that enables practitioners to quickly assess their organization's readiness for scale and to clearly identify areas for improvement in four distinct areas: Social Impact, Financial Viability, Internal Capacity, and External Enablers.

The tool also offers a collection of best practices gathered from the experiences of social enterprises who are presently scaling inclusive business solutions in nutrition, water, health, agriculture, and energy. The best practices are illustrated by concrete lessons learned from these organizations along their scaling journeys."