Publication database

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 briefing paper presents an introduction to the key challenges facing the cocoa industry in Indonesia and Vietnam. It focuses on the current approaches to improve productivity taken by business and identifies opportunities and interventions required for a move to an inclusive business approach.

This paper provides an introduction to the key challenges faced by the shrimp industry and practices in three of the world’s main producing countries: Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia. It focuses on small scale fisheries, farmers and processors and identifies possible entry points and interventions for inclusive business opportunities.

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 paper examines the concept of social enterprise, and focuses its research on social enterprises defined by a hybrid business model rather than their financial or social performance or social impact. Focusing on Vietnam and Kenya - it assesses the potential role for social enterprises of this type in the agriculture and health fields and it identifies specific markets, activities or circumstances where the hybrid model may have validity.

This guide offers a practical resource on how to analyse and upgrade value chains, with numerous full-colour diagrams, charts and photos, the content is deliberately tailored to the needs of those who are actually employed in value chains in the Pacific. As well as an introduction to the topic and a step-by-step guide to value chain analysis, this accessible handbook provides a wealth of lessons from case studies, along with helpful additional tools and resources.

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'.

This report explores how 12 technologies can create value in India; it groups the transformative technologies in three categories: 'digitizing life and work', 'smart physical systems', and 'energy technologies' and assesses the potential impact of the 12 technologies on the economy within the following sectors: financial services, education, health, agriculture, energy, infrastructure, and government services.

This short paper discusses the project Promotion of Social and Environmental Standards (PSES) in the Industry, implemented by GIZ. The project was developed by the Bangladesh Ministry of Commerce and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) in order to help garment factories implement the new Labour Act.

This study analyses the conditions under which a small-scale rural power supply business becomes viable and whether larger plants can be used to electrify a cluster of villages. It shows that serving low electricity consuming customers alone leads to part capacity utilisation of the electricity generation plant and results in a high cost of supply.