"This paper examines the impact of improvements in marketing skills relative to finance skills among small-scale entrepreneurs. It addresses three important questions: (1) What is the impact of marketing or finance skills on business profits? (2) How do improvements in marketing and finance skills respectively affect different business outcomes? (3) When are increases in marketing relative to finance skills more beneficial? Through a randomized control study of 852 firms in South Africa, the analysis finds significant improvements in profitability from both types of business skills training. However, the pathways to achieve these gains differ substantially between the two groups. The marketing group achieves greater profits by adopting a growth focus on higher sales, greater investments in stock and materials, and hiring more employees. The finance group achieves similar profit gains but through an efficiency focus on lower costs. Both groups show significantly higher adoption of business practices related to their respective training program. Consistent with a growth focus, marketing/sales skills are significantly more beneficial to businesses run by entrepreneurs with ex ante less exposure to different market contexts. In contrast and in line with an efficiency focus, it is the more established businesses that benefit significantly more from finance/accounting skills."

"This discussion paper builds on the results of the Conference Financing Global Development - Leveraging Impact Investing for the SDGs hosted by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in Berlin on 21st November 2017.

This paper shares the findings of the session. It aims to foster a conversation around impact measurement and management 2.0 and actively integrating impact incentivization in investment processes. The discussion focussed on how to incentivize the impact investing chain - those who provide capital, those who manage it, and those who receive it - to channel their efforts towards high impact SGBs and to provide adequate support for scaling impact."

"This book summarizes five years of learning from data collected as part of the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative. The authors present data describing impact-oriented ventures and accelerators that operate in both high-income countries and in emerging markets. Blending survey data with insights from sector experts, their various analyses shed light on the basic structure of accelerators, showing where they are having their most promising results.

Unlike previous studies, this book does not focus on a few high-profile accelerators (like TechStars and Y Combinator) and startups (like AirBnB and Uber). Instead, it compares a range of accelerator programs that target specific impact areas, challenging regions, and marginalized entrepreneurs. Therefore, it serves as a valuable tool for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners interested in the effectiveness of accelerator programs as tools that unleash the economic potential currently trapped in entrepreneurial dead spaces."

"Anecdotal evidence of successfully accelerated ventures has been followed by more rigorous studies by GALI and some emerging academic research. But as the evidence behind accelerator effectiveness expands, the question remains-at what cost? This methods brief first frames the various ways accelerators can think about value for money of their programs. Then, it explores one practical approach to calculating value for money. Finally, the brief summarizes similar evaluations conducted for other types of entrepreneur support programs. Accelerators and funders can use this guide to understand their options for assessing value for money and to consider how they could incorporate this concept into their data collection and program assessments."

"Designing resilience programs that effectively strengthen women's resilience capacities requires a detailed understanding of each pathway in the program setting. In recognition of the need for context-specific gender and resilience analysis, BRIGE (Building Resilience through Integration of Gender and Empowerment) worked with resilience programs in Indonesia, Nepal, and Niger to develop and to pilot measurement tools that serve multiple purposes for gender integration in Mercy Corps' resilience-focused programs. These purposes include identifying gender-related barriers to resilience, measuring how resilience programs affect these pathways, and supporting staff learning.

This report synthesizes lessons learned from the pilot studies where these tools were developed and applied. It provides guidance on how to contextualize future applications of the tools for different situations and purposes, as well as how to interpret and analyze findings. The report presents the three gender and resilience tools with suggested learning goals, tool questions and instructions, interpretation and analysis, lessons from the pilots, and ways to modify the tools for a specific context."

"This report outlines impact investors' approaches to achieving responsible exits, drawing insights from interviews with more than 30 investors and entrepreneurs and a review of existing resources on the topic. Four case studies of various exit methods as applied to investments in a natural gas conversion company, a microfinance institution, land conservation, and a microinsurance provider highlight the various effective practices and lessons that investors have discovered when working with investees and co-investors to align capital structures, buyers, and business models to ensure continued impact post-exit."

"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 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."

"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?"

"We organized business associations for the owner-managers of young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,820 firms into small groups whose managers held monthly meetings for one year, and into a "no-meetings" control group. We find the following. (i) The meetings increased firm revenue by 8.1%, and also significantly increased profit, factors, inputs, the number of partners, borrowing, and a management score. (ii) These effects persisted one year after the conclusion of the meetings. (iii) Firms randomized to have better peers exhibited higher growth. We exploit additional interventions to document concrete channels. (iv) Managers shared exogenous business-relevant information, particularly when they were not competitors, showing that the meetings facilitated learning from peers. (v) Managers created more business partnerships in the regular than in other one-time meetings, showing that the meetings improved supplier-client matching."