Giving Compass' Take:

• This Stanford Social Innovation Review post explores ways to improve entrepreneur support programs that are popular with donors. They often fail to incorporate rigorous research.

• Collecting more evidence around different business segments and unlocking risk-tolerant capital are just a few of the recommendations. How are we incorporating such strategies into social investments?

• Here are some more valuable lessons from world-changing women entrepreneurs.


There is strong evidence that small and growing businesses are important engines of prosperity, accounting for a disproportionate amount of employment growth. Programs designed to help start and scale these businesses — which we define as commercially viable, with 5 to 250 employees, and potential and ambition for growth — have become popular among donors. Many major institutions, including the International Labor Organization, World Bank, and USAID, are supporting initiatives to help entrepreneurs expand their businesses through skills development, financing, mentorship, and market linkages.

Yet even large-scale, business-support programs frequently fail to undergo rigorous impact assessments and struggle to incorporate best practices from existing research into program design. Programs often decide between different models — for example, a light-touch classroom model that reaches a large group of entrepreneurs versus a higher-touch, consulting model that reaches only a few — based on hunches rather than evidence.

But what does the evidence — academic evidence, based on experimental studies — actually tell us about whether these programs help businesses grow? And what can the organizations that run these programs learn from it to design more effective interventions?

Read the full article about ways to support small and growing businesses in emerging markets by Matthew Guttentag at Stanford Social Innovation Review.