The Impact Due Diligence Guide: Practical guidance for investors seeking to systematically assess investments' anticipated impact

By Pacific Community Ventures

The Guide is a how-to for engaging in impact due diligence and contains actionable advice and guidance for both novices as well as seasoned experts in IMM, covering topics such as building impact-focused due diligence questionnaires and quantitative tools, integrating impact due diligence into existing processes, and using impact due diligence to inform investment decision-making. Given the sheer magnitude of our global challenges, it is essential that impact investors deepen their focus on impact pre-investment through impact due diligence. By doing this we can guard against “impact washing” and realize our collective vision of building a sustainable financial industry that meaningfully tackles, rather than contributes to, the most critical issues we face today.

Read the full guide here.

Read the "Emerging Best Practices" guide here.

Bending The Arc: How The Full Spectrum of Capital Can Enable Inclusive Growth in Agriculture

By FSG

In this report, FSG explores the role of different kinds of capital in bending the arc of agricultural market development towards inclusive growth. FSG pays particular attention to how impact-focused players deploying capital that is flexible in terms of risk-return expectations can best deploy it in order to catalyze large-scale transformations towards inclusion.

Read the executive summary here.

Read the full report here.

Venture Capital and the Gender Financing Gap: The Role of Accelerators

By IFC, the World Bank Group Gender Innovation Lab, Village Capital and We-Fi

Women entrepreneurs in emerging markets face a daunting gender finance gap when it comes to growing their start-ups into mainstream businesses.  New research shows that despite women leading half the start-ups that participate in accelerators they continue to face greatly unequal access to capital. This report, developed by IFC and the World Bank Group Gender Innovation Lab in partnership with Village Capital and We-Fi, studies the steep differential between financing for male and female-led start-ups post-acceleration and finds perceived risk and investor bias are the most likely causes. The comprehensive research found that acceleration actually seems to increase the gap in equity fundraising.  

Read the full report here. 

Talent to de-Risk and Accelerate Investment (TRAIN)

By Open Capital and USAID

SGBs often face particularly acute challenges in raising capital. The USAID-supported “Talent to de-Risk and Accelerate Investment (TRAIN)” initiative aimed to test the combination of a new, streamlined due diligence approach with a talent-enabled model of post-investment support to reduce investor risk. In this report, Open Capital, as TRAIN implementer, shares lessons, observations and ideas from TRAIN to enable more investors and ecosystem stakeholders to engage more effectively with early-stage SGBs in East and Southern Africa.

Read the full report here. 

Enhancing the Financial Health of Micro-entrepreneurs: Beyond a mere assessment

By Klaas Molenaar (Timpoc Consultants) and Mathilde Bauwin (ADA)

This report provides an in-depth understanding on the financial health issues of micro-enterprises, the financial well-being of the micro-entrepreneurs and the ways in which such financial health and well-being might be enhanced. The major finding is that programs related to the financial health of micro-enterprises must not only focus on assessing a micro-entrepreneur’s understanding of the financial issues related to his/her business and be able to measure their capacity to deal with those issues, but more relevantly, programs must also draw up action plans to broaden and deepen the understanding and capacity of the micro-entrepreneurs.

Read the executive summary here. 

Read the full report here.