Publication database

Africa has long been on the frontier of the global investment landscape and still accounts for a small share of the world economy. But looking ahead, we see a range of fundamental supports for economic activity and prospective investment returns on the continent. This reports outlines the growth story in sub-Saharan Africa and begin to uncover some of the key investment themes that are developing across the region.

The report updates the understanding of country and firm-level barriers to investment (macro-level constraints, lack of capital for risk/return profile, transaction costs, and information asymmetries), and nuances the suggested interventions to address them. With a particular focus on neglected firm-level barriers, the report describes how supporting pioneer investors and companies with expertise, surge bandwidth, geographic presence, and neutral intermediation can unlock stalled investment opportunities.

Research on impact investing is often conducted from the perspective of the investor, failing to account for the perspective of the impact entrepreneur on the ground. In particular, little primary research has concentrated on those who applied for impact investment funding but were turned down.This report details the ways in which local impact entrepreneurs have experienced the impact investing process, including the expectations of and communications with investors.

This study was designed to improve the understanding of the challenges and opportunities involved in fnancing womenowned businesses in emerging markets. It looks at how capital fows to these businesses: who is involved, the roles they play, the tools they have, and how they interact with each other.

This rapid evidence assessment examines and synthesises the evidence base on the development impact of DFI investment. The objective is to strengthen DFID’s understanding of the critical assumptions underpinning its private sector development (PSD) theory of change to inform future PSD programming decisions. In particular, this rapid evidence assessment looks at what the current evidence tells us about DFI investment impacts on: incomes access to goods and services; distributional impacts (specifically poverty, gender, youth and quality jobs).

The off-grid solar energy industry is generating thousands of jobs across East, West and Central Africa as well as South Asia. GOGLA's latest report Off-Grid Solar. A Growth Engine for Jobs estimates the sector currently supports 370,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs across these four regions. With investments and the right policies, the off-grid solar sector could create 1.3 million FTE jobs across East, West and Central Africa as well as South Asia by 2022.

To boost agricultural development in developing countries, donors are increasingly resorting to blended finance: the practice of combining public development funds with private resources. Blended finance may open opportunities to inject more resources into the food and agriculture sector, but the assumptions that blended finance is inherently beneficial for agricultural development and that it is an efficient way to finance smallholder agriculture, are not supported by the evidence currently available.

This paper argues that private finance blending should be used with caution in rural development until donors can demonstrate the merits of blending using evidence-based results, in particular the added value of blending for development impact. This is especially important given the obligations of donors to make progress on the reduction of social, economic and gender inequalities. The increasing focus on private finance should not obscure the vital role of public finance in promoting inclusive agricultural transformation that benefits small-scale farmers.

Unleashing Private Capital for Global Health Innovation takes stock of the needs of innovators and investors. This report:

• Lays out the challenges and opportunities of innovating and investing in global health
• Proposes a catalytic early stage “Innovator Support Facility” designed to increase the number of promising innovators successfully navigating the “valley of death” and reaching a point where they can attract and absorb more traditional sources of private capital
• Proposes a blended finance & global health “Investor Support Facility” designed to provide low cost risk capital to offset lower risk-adjusted returns in global health and ‘crowd-in’ a wider array of private investors

Over the last decade, impact investing has gained prominence as an approach to investment that aims to achieve both financial returns and social or environmental goals. This report takes stock of the size and segments of the impact investing market as of 2018 and estimates its growth potential through an analysis of investor preferences.

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.