Publication database

Around the globe, a wave of innovation is sweeping across the financial sector, from public equities to bonds, real estate to insurance, venture investing to small-business lending. In each of these areas, innovative players are using an ever-growing range of instruments to achieve social and environmental benefits, while producing attractive returns. This is the exciting field of sustainable finance, and it is growing fast. Nowhere is the opportunity for sustainable finance greater than in Asia, and only a sliver of this opportunity has been realized.

This study focuses on 12 skills delivery initiatives led by the private sector and carried out to support the national skills mission of the Government of India. The objective of this study is to generate lessons learnt from India’s experience in skilling, namely to identify and analyse impactful business models and their practices and innovations, to highlight challenges, and to provide insights on how the private sector could contribute even more to skills acquisition and employability.

Asia is facing simultaneously huge growth potential and increasing inequalities, with often weak national solutions to the social issues at hand. Social purpose organisations (SPOs) are seen to solve these issues sustainably. Social incubation is seen as a tool to help SPOs grow and potentially build a pipeline for social investors. This paper presents insights from surveying 15 social incubators in Asa which have existed for at least two years. 

This report examines the performance of the electricity sector in Rajasthan, assessing its ability to recover operating costs, reliably meet demand, make investments and operate according to environmental and social norms.

This publication describes how the Government of India has extended protection against catastrophic health expenditures to poor and informal workers through Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), a national health insurance scheme whose design and implementation is supported by Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The report provides a detailed description of RSBY including achievements and challenges, a future perspective of RSBY and lessons learned.

This report explores how mobile solutions are helping to improve agricultural productivity, efficiency and rural livelihoods in emerging markets, with a focus on six services: agricultural information services, receipt services, payments and loans, field audit, local supply chain, and smartphone-enabled services.

This report analyses the demand for inclusive business in agriculture, healthcare and renewable energy and discusses the challenges and opportunities for transfer of inclusive business models from India to sub-Saharan Africa. The report draws on insights from 11 inclusive businesses and 44 industry practitioners. The preparation of this report and toolkit was led by Ishira Mehta and Pallavi Shrivastava from IFC

This report discussions a set of randomized experiments that shed light on how markets and information influence household decisions to adopt nutritional innovations.

This report identifies the need for community safe water solutions (CSWSs) in rural India and reviews the models employed by key sector players to address this need. It provides a platform for assessing and understanding the market for CSWSs by exploring the current economic and operating models, operating challenges, and funding scenarios for ensuring sustainability and scale-up.

This report provides an overview of the impact investing ecosystem in India; it highlights the sector’s emergence, the unique characteristics, the dominant approach to investing, and the key areas of focus for the sector going forward. It describes how the sector is characterised by: 'innovations tooted in local context', 'investing that adopts an entrepreneur led approach', 'an ecosystem focused on accountability', and 'impact investors with the ability to unlock main-stream capital'.