Publication database

This report discusses "system leadership" needed to tackle global challenges like food security, climate change, job creation, and gender parity. System leadership can help align the efforts of diverse stakeholders in order to accelerate this process, and ensure that it delivers more sustainable, inclusive business growth and human development.

The Entrepreneurship Database Program at Emory University leverages relationships with a growing number of accelerator programs to collect systematic data from entrepreneurs who apply to and participate in accelerator programs. This report summarizes application data collected from entrepreneurs who participated in the programs during 2013, 2014, 2015 and early 2016. It covers aspects like e.g. venture performance indicators, country of operations, sectors and impact objectives, gender or profit margin aspirations.

This brief article points out different aspects of innovation in low-income countries as well crucial impeding factors of innovations.

This article describes and ranks 10 lessons that Acumen has learned while working to tackle global poverty. The lessons learned include: 'dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth'; and that 'neither grants nor markets alone will solve the problems of poverty'.

This report details the impact of the Bamboo Finance portfolio of 46 companies across 30 countries. Bamboo Finance is a commercial private equity firm specialising in investing in business models that benefit low-income communities in emerging markets.

This report discusses the state of the mobile money sector and industry trends, and it provides insights into the rollout and adoption of other mobile financial services such as mobile insurance. It is designed to provide practitioner and stakeholders, such as regulators, senior executives in the telecommunications and banking sectors, and international development agencies, with an overview of the industry and its impact on the financial lives of unbanked and under banked users.

This annual survey provides the latest insight into investor perceptions and a number of key market variables such as types of investors, the number and size of investments made, target returns, and impact measurement practices. This “State of the Market” analysis explores how investments continue to be made across different geographies, a range of sectors, and multiple asset classes, signalling continued market growth and an increasing interest in impact investing opportunities.

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.

This report explores the gap in global affordable housing - it outlines how four approaches - unlocking land supply, reducing construction costs, improving operations and maintenance, and lowering financing costs for buyers and developers - could reduce the cost of affordable housing by 20 to 50%, and substantially narrow the affordable housing gap by 2025.

This report documents an interview with Ruban Selvanayagam from Fez Tá Pronto Construction System in Brazil, a real estate development model that is focused on serving people at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) with affordable and high quality housing. It discusses the dysfunctional mainstream housing market dynamics, and the current practical challenges that face the scheme.