Publication database

This report presents findings and best practices from idh's innovating partners with regards to empowering farmers through service delivery, while generating sustainable returns to their businesses. Learn more about their models’ drivers of farmer resilience, cost reduction and financial sustainability.  And get inspired, by service models helping millions of smallholder farmers out of poverty, in often remote areas and developing economies around the globe.

P2P business models like Airbnb or Uber provide an organised way to collectively share certain resources. Could similar solutions reduce the barriers to sharing of the limited existing sanitation facilities in low income countries? During 2016 and 2017 Inclusive Business Sweden and Aqua for All, supported by Unilever and funded by Transform, carried out a project named ‘Peer-to-peer Business Models to Meet Sanitation Needs’ to explore this possibility.

The study (i) reviews the definitions and concepts of social enterprises, (ii) outlines the landscape across 10 selected countries in Asia and Latin America, (iii) discusses challenges to scaling as faced by social enterprises, and (iv) presents suggestions for development banks to extend support to social enterprises through public and private sector investments. The study categorizes social enterprises and argues that the comparative advantage of development banks is to support selected social enterprises that are commercially bankable and have the base of the pyramid (BOP) at the core of their business operations. Development banks can support these enterprises—considered as the inclusive businesses of the future—through investing in impact funds and/or public sector loans.

According to the Startup India Action Plan, 2016, one of the major challenges is the failure of most startups during the initial five years due to lack of either funds or management skills. Therefore, developing a conducive environment becomes crucial to support start-ups during their initial years of operations. This handbook is an endeavour to provide insight on several models that could be explored to set up a fund to promote start-ups, contributions to which would qualify as CSR spend under the Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013.

This report provides case studies and lessons learned from seven Asian countries in five areas of innovative financing for development. Such innovative financing for development would benefit inclusive businesses as a new source of funding.

PPPLab interviewed the lead partners of 12 public private partnerships (PPPs) working in Kenya and Ghana. This exploration brief presents their way of working with governments and public sectors.  Within these countries, the food and water sectors have been supported through a number of Dutch grant instruments, which aimed to accelerate development through the advantages of collaboration between the public and private sectors.

Contract farming (CF) agreements are presently being restructured to form part of more complex Inclusive Business (IB) set-ups. Additional instruments, alongside CF, are implemented to overcome the challenges of CF and to adapt to the policy environment in which the different stakeholders operate. This paper develops a theoretical framework that gives insight into how these complex entities are structured and operate in a developing country context. It finds that a high dependence by the offtaker in the first case study stimulates a higher level of commitment and investment by this stakeholder in the contract arrangement. In turn, this increases the asset specificity aspect, which then requires safeguards to ensure the smallholders adhere to the contractual agreement. A higher dependency in this particular study also resulted in a higher number of smallholders being engaged in the contract, requiring mechanisms to efficiently monitor and coordinate them.

Inclusive business is hailed as a win-win scenario for the development of smallholder farmers and poor communities; yet there is little insight into how these inclusive businesses work and, more importantly, for whom. This book aims for a thorough understanding of the range of inclusive businesses in agriculture by examining: the structures they implement, the actors involved, and whether they are effectively inclusive of smallholders. By offering a critical assessment of inclusive businesses overall, it allows for a better perception of what works where, and under which conditions. It provides useful insights that will benefit smallholders, agri-businesses, support groups, policy makers and investors who are willing to promote more inclusive businesses, that foster a better integration of smallholders into commercial value-chains and a more equitable and sustainable agricultural sector.

This report investigates barriers and solutions to scale for market-based approaches offering cleaner energy access to low-income customers in developing countries, for home and small scale productive uses. The objective is to learn from a selection of the most innovative and successful practitioners, representing solutions with high potential and innovation dynamics: solar lanterns, solar home systems, clean energy microgrids, solar irrigation pumps, and improved cook stoves.