Publication database

The 2020 Annual Impact Investor Survey provides a comprehensive overview of the impact investing market. This edition captures data from 294 of the world’s leading impact investors who collectively manage USD 404 billion of impact investing assets, representing an important subset of the USD 715 billion global impact investing market. The report looks at respondents’ investment activity during 2019 and their plans for 2020, market developments over the past decade, and challenges facing the market going forward. Respondents also shared insights on how Covid-19 might affect their activities.

IIC releases an annual “Year in Retrospect" publication that throws light on investment trends and emerging market developments across key impact sectors such as Financial Inclusion, Agriculture, Healthcare, Technology for Development and Climate-tech. Their research highlights that 2021 has proven to be a strong year for the Indian impact sector, with more than 300 impact focussed enterprises raising $7 Bn in capital. While investment activity was robust across sectors as well as the stage of development of the enterprise, several late-stage companies have raised significant amounts of capital leading to a 135% growth in overall capital raised in 2021 vis a vis 2020.

Produced by Magnitt, Wa’ed sponsors the 2021 MENA VC Impact Investment Report, which tries to shed some light on the VC impact investment ecosystem in MENA since 2016. The report reveals that $444m was invested across 403 deals by impact-driven startups across the region since 2016. This accounts for 7% of all venture capital (VC) deployed in MENA startups between 2016 and the third quarter of 2021. The information gathered in the report aims to enable a more informed conversation on this space between stakeholders, and to attract greater investment and support for impact-driven sectors and startups.

Blended finance is a strategy that combines capital with different levels of risk in order to catalyze risk-adjusted, market-rate-seeking financing into impact investments. The Blended Finance Working Group identified a number of challenges that arise in structuring blended finance investments. This resource is divided into three sections. Each section includes a downloadable list of key considerations and questions aimed to ensure stakeholders are aware of each other’s motivations and expectations in engaging in a blended finance structure; and links to blended finance case study examples to demonstrate the range of ways each catalytic tool can be leveraged in  blended finance structures.
 

The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) launched the Advancing Women’s Empowerment Fund (AWEF) in 2019 with support from the Visa Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The overall goal of AWEF-funded projects is to address the gender financing gap for women-owned small and growing businesses (SGBs) in developing economies. The first round of grantmaking, AWEF Asia, funded eight entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs) in Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, the Philippines, Pakistan, and India, as well as programs serving the region as a whole. This report summarizes the lessons learned from these grants.

Numerous enterprises are creating substantial positive impact yet their outcomes are often not fully compensated. By linking financial rewards to outcomes achieved, the nudge to create even more impact and the ability to crowdin investment are growing. This is the idea behind ImpactLinked Finance (ILF). ILF intersects with blended finance, impact investing and results-based finance and offers a compelling opportunity to directly support market-based enterprises with a broad scope of instruments.

The goal of this document is to provide the key principles of social investment in Asia, based on an extensive literature review and in-depth interviews with a range of experts. Mapped across the life-cycle of a project, these are broad, high-level principles that work for investments encompassing the SDGs, with specific examples from areas of healthcare, gender, livelihoods and climate in Asia. For social investors looking to incorporate the SDG Impact Standards developed by UNDP12 in their work, the principles can serve as an accessible pathway to provide direction.

The African Impact Report 2019 is a catalyst for collaborative coordination amongst global stakeholders to fast track sustainable and scalable solutions for Africa’s prioritized impact needs. This working paper presents a baseline of the progress pertaining to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union (AU) Agenda 2063, macroeconomic growth prospects, capital availability and sector opportunities. It further outlines gaps which require a collaborative effort to address in order to ensure the much needed outcomes for the African continent is achieved.

In its eighth edition, this year’s survey provides in-depth analysis of market activity and trends, covering topics such as: capital allocations by sector and geography, indicators of market development and industry challenges, approaches to impact measurement and management, and satisfaction with financial and impact performance. The report includes a five-year trends analysis of growth and changes in the industry. It also presents extensive information on many aspects of today’s impact investing market and sheds light on investors’ perspectives on a variety of current market topics such as: strategies to preserve impact integrity, the level of importance of various technologies to the future of impact investing, the role of public policy, and the role of blended finance.

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.