Publication database

The report builds off the 2015 Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) study, The Landscape for Impact Investing in West Africa. Nigeria and Ghana represented more than half (54%) of impact investing capital in the region, with Nigeria receiving 29% and Ghana receiving 25% of the capital deployed. This 2019 study seeks to understand the extent to which investor experience, deal flow, and outlook have evolved since 2015 and policy has enabled or inhibited impact investing, and in turn to propose policy recommendations that address the issues identified.

This report presents the main messages of the Second ASEAN Inclusive Business Summit that took place on 1 November 2019 in Bangkok. As a result of efforts to promote inclusive business at the ASEAN and national levels, the majority of ASEAN Member States are engaging actively in inclusive business policy development. ASEAN leaders have commended and encouraged governments and private sector actors to continue promoting inclusive business, as stated in the ASEAN Chairman’s Statement of the 35th ASEAN Summit. A framework for the development of effective inclusive business policy instruments has emerged through the experience of frontrunner countries, highlighting eight strategic areas of inclusive business promotion.

This 2019 edition of Africa’s Development Dynamics explores policies for productive transformation in Africa. It proposes three main policy focus for transforming firms: providing business services to clusters of firms; developing regional production networks; and improving exporting firms’ ability to thrive in fast-changing markets.

The ASEAN Integration Report is a flagship publication of the ASEAN Integration Monitoring Directorate of the ASEAN Secretariat and is published periodically. The 2019 edition provides a comprehensive assessment of progress and achievements in ASEAN economic integration since the adoption of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) Blueprint 2025 in 2015. Chapter 3 references inclusive business as a key approach to achieve "a resilient, inclusive, people-oriented, and people-centred ASEAN".

This issue brief, part of a series published by ANDE in 2019, is designed to create a common knowledge base from which the Small and Growing Business (SGB) sector can work in the hopes of advancing towards selected development goals. This brief explains how SGB support organizations can help achieve SDG 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth, through the examination of SGBs as job creators in emerging markets, SGBs as drivers of economic growth in emerging markets, and SGBs and the changing nature of work.

This Roadmap for the Small and Growing Business (SGB) Sector outlines the expected transformations in the sector over the next ten years, and the challenges and opportunities inherent to such change. It includes a set of 13 recommendationsthat, if adopted, can help sector support organizations focus resources, initiate momentum-building, “catalytic” actions, and mitigate inherent challenges from both within and outside the sector. The Roadmap is meant to provide high-level strategic direction to sector support organizations engaged in strategic or program planning and seeking additional perspective on where to invest time, effort, and resources to advance the promise of SGBs.

There are large productivity differences across firms in developing countries, even within the same sector and region. Understanding what contributes to such differences in productivity is important for designing policies to help low productivity firms grow.

Commendable progress has been made across many parts of Africa over the past years to increase agricultural productivity, reduce hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, create new employment opportunities for young people and improve the livelihoods of rural communities. Yet, demographic change, urbanization, shifting diets and climatic changes mean that pressure is growing on food systems to make more food and more varied and nutritious food available and accessible.  How African countries position themselves to harness and deploy digital technologies will determine the future competitiveness of African agriculture and its contribution to African economies.

The current report — Byte by byte: policy innovation for transforming Africa’s food system with digital technologies— summarizes the key findings of a systematic analysis of what seven African countries at the forefront of progress on digitalization of the agriculture sector have done right. It analyzes which institutional and policy innovations were implemented and which actions by the private sector and agtech start-ups were taken to increase the development and use of digital tools and services in the agriculture value chain. The objective of this report is to identify interventions that work and benefit farmers and other actors in the value chain and recommend options for policy and program innovation that allow countries to develop a digitalization ecosystem in which digital technologies and services can be developed and used to foster growth and competitiveness in Africa’s agriculture value chains.