Publication database

Commissioned by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, this report presents an analysis of four smallholder support programmes in South Africa.

World Hope International provides low-cost greenhouses to farmers in Sierra Leone and Mozambique. This report encompasses the monitoring and evaluation of the greenhouses installed in Mozambique’s Gaza and Maputo provinces. With the greenhouses, farmers can grow crops faster and all year round, using less water and fewer seeds. Crops and seedlings grown in the greenhouses are of better quality and have greater chances for survival, because the greenhouses protect the plants from weather variations and pests. Farmers had an overall positive attitude towards the greenhouses and 87 percent of those interviewed plan to continue using them.

The Bhungroo system helps smallholder farmers harvest rainwater throughout the monsoon season so they can use it during the dry season. This report details monitoring and evaluation of the recent installation of 52 Bhungroo systems among the poorest smallholder farmers of Harij in Gujarat’s Patan district.

In 2014, Echoing Green, a non-profit irganisation, piloted an impact investing “inflection cohort” of ten alumni of their Fellowship programme, each leading for-profit and hybrid social enterprises. This white paper looks at the inflection cohort pilot’s performance in supporting emerging social entrepreneurs.

This comprehensive report takes the five step impact measurement methodology from the EVPA and applies it to two case studies; Investisseurs & Partenaires, a social impact fund focused on supporting small and fast growing African enterprises and Reach for Change, a grant maker offering a five-year incubation programme for early stag entrepreneurs focusing on improving the lives of children.

This report runs through the CART principles (= Credible, Actionable, Responsible, and Transportable) which aim to improve monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems. Like in the Goldilocks fairy-tale, where a girl finds a home of three bears and things are either too big, too small or just right, the CART principles support social enterprises to collect the right data that corresponds exactly to their needs. The case study examines the theories of change and measurement strategies for two investments of the impact investor organisation Acumen.

This case study examines the poverty profile of Indian healthcare enterprise ZHL’s clients in the states of Odisha (formerly Orissa) and Punjab using the Progress out of Poverty Index. It measures the poverty rates to better understand what factors might drive the company’s outreach to the poor (particularly poor women), and it tests a more cost-efficient method of measuring poverty levels through phone surveys.

This brief looks at the growth of bKash, a private limited company created specifically to provide mobile financial services in Bangladesh. bkash is art of the BRAC group, a nongovernment organization (NGO) that provides social services and includes 18 related social enterprises. The brief provides background information on bKash, explains how the business model works and explores three success factors which led to the company's early growth.

This case study looks at Coletivo Retail, an eight-week training programme to empower unemployed youth living in low-income communities, such as favelas, and to help them find new economic opportunities, set up by Coca-Cola in Brazil to strengthen its business by advancing the economic and social conditions in the communities in which it operates. The programme is present across 126 sites in Brazil and Coca-Cola’s sales in Coletivo communities grow 9.5% more per year on average, as a result of increased small retailer productivity and higher levels of economic prosperity in Coletivo communities.

This case study explores Penda Health which provides high-quality, evidence-based, standardised primary care, both curative and preventative, to low- and middle-income families in Kenya while also specialising in women’s health care. It reviews the impacts of providing access to primary health care on children age eight and younger and on pregnant women living in BoP communities.