Roughly two billion people in the world live on $2 a day or less. Of these a staggering 50 per cent are estimated to be micro entrepreneurs, running a small business to make ends meet but employing only a handful of people. If just a small proportion of these entrepreneurs were encouraged to grow and invest in their business, and hire more employees, it could transform the fortunes of the developing economies, and billions of people living in poverty. In this article, Stephen Anderson-Macdonald discusses the "Managerial Capital and Business Transformation in Emerging Markets" project, among others, which examines how transformational entrepreneurs can be identified and nurtured.
SME Initiative In the News
Monday, April 15, 2013 | Stephan Anderson MacDonald | London Business Review
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 | |
The Small & Medium Enterprise (SME) Initiative is pleased to announce that it is now accepting a FIFTH ROUND of applications for it its Competitive Research Fund on Entrepreneurship and SME Growth. The goal of this fund is to support innovative research that is in line with the initiative’s objective to build a systemic body of evidence on the contributions of SME growth to poverty alleviation and economic development. We hope that this competition will have a catalyzing effect to stimulate high quality research that can produce relevant evidence to innovate, implement and scale programs that promote SME growth. For this round of grants, complete proposals should be emailed to sme@poverty-action.org by 5:00 pm EST on April 15, 2013.
Please see the full RFP description, the application form, and budgeting guidelines.
Thursday, November 29, 2012 | Russell Toth | IPA Blog
Russell Toth reflects on a question he was asked at IPA's 2012 Impact and Policy conference: how can researchers work with policymakers to draw policy implications from proof of concept studies in programs that are designed to augment the managerial capital of SMEs?
SME Initiative Holds Second Working Group
Friday, November 16, 2012 | | Cambridge, MA
IPA’s SME Initiative, in collaboration with Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries (PEDL), held its second Working Group in Cambridge, MA – a full-day event that brought together 41 researchers, practitioners and donors to discuss early-stage research and potential new projects pertaining to SME policy and entrepreneurship. The Working Group provided an opportunity for affiliates of the SME Initiative and PEDL to share their work, discuss potential areas for collaboration, and network with others active in the SME space.
A diverse array of presentations covered topics including, among others, the agenda and opportunities for collaboration with the new SME Finance Forum, the impact of exporting on quality and production of goods in Egyptian SME clusters, innovative platforms for third party contract enforcement, mobile solutions for improving SME management, credit constraints faced by coffee farmers, mobile salary payments in Afghan firms, and demand building and export dynamics in Chinese footwear firms.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012 | David McKenzie | All About Finance Blog
Given that evaluations of business training programs targeting female subsistence entrepreneurs have shown mixed results, David McKenzie asks if training programs aimed at improving business skills are worth the cost if entrepreneurs are constrained by underlying production technology. He posits that the seemingly small impact of the programs might be improved by combining business training with interventions that address what women entrepreneurs produce and how they produce it.
Funding Partners
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private nonpartisan foundation that works to harness the power of entrepreneurship and innovation to grow economies and improve human welfare.
The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to the Big Questions of human purpose, including exploring effective ways to empower the world’s poor to make progress towards prosperity.
SEVEN (Social Equity Venture Fund) is a virtual non-profit entity run by entrepreneurs whose strategy is to markedly increase the rate of innovation and diffusion of enterprise-based solutions to poverty. It does this by targeted investment that fosters thought leadership through books, films and websites; supporting role models - whether they are entrepreneurs or innovative firms - in developing nations; and shaping a new discourse in government, the press and the academy around private-sector innovation, prosperity and progressive human values.
