What are the three biggest challenges facing small and growing businesses in emerging markets over the next three years? ANDE Executive Director, Randall Kempner, posed this question to fifteen international development leaders in February of this year. These were the top issues that emerged.

The world needs jobs—and small, early-stage businesses in developing countries have the potential to create them. Yet, emerging market startups struggle with the same challenges as larger, more established firms. Randall Kempner writes about the obstacles for small and growing businesses - or SGBs as we like to refer to them - in the Wall Street Journal.

Randall Kempner writes about lessons from microfinance in the Harvard Business Review blog.

In emerging markets, the COVID-19 crisis presents an even greater economic challenge than in the United States. The American economy was the strongest in the world before the crisis. Even now, under widespread stay-at-home orders, US unemployment has risen to only 20%, whereas most emerging market countries started the year with formal unemployment rates well above 20%.

Randall Kempner and CIPE’s Director of Knowledge Management, Kim Bettcher, discuss ANDE’s strategy over the past decade since its founding in 2009, and what its new strategy will be in the next decade.

Do accelerators really help entrepreneurs raise more money for their businesses? The answer so far seems to be yes – both in emerging market country contexts, as well as in high-income countries. But how much and to what extent they are effective varies greatly from program to program.

"We live in a world characterized by gender inequality. Throughout the globe, women continue to struggle for equal wages, access to capital and financing, training, supply chain inclusion and more. This state of affairs is unfair, unethical and unwise. Reams of research show that investing in women is not only the right thing to do, it’s the economically smart thing to do—for women and men." Randall Kempner makes the case for why it's past time for the world to invest more in women.

"A successful entrepreneurship ecosystem can help hundreds of social enterprises thrive," write Kate McElligott and Randall Kempner. This article lays out six things to keep in mind when implementing an entrepreneurial ecosystem initiative in order to improve the environment in which social entrepreneurs work.