International Network for Economics and Conflict

This short guide is designed to help project site operators in companies in the extractive industries to create a policy and strategy for local procurement.

Women entrepreneurs around the world need access to finance, markets, and peer networks, whether they are in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, or the United States. In this article, three panelists from CIPE’s Democracy that Delivers for Women conference discuss their experiences with women entrepreneurs in those countries, highlighting opportunities, challenges, and resources.

This paper studies the impact of a comprehensive business and financial literacy program on firm outcomes of young entrepreneurs in an emerging post-conflict economy, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Rigorous research on state-building is still in its infancy. In this article, Collier takes three issues that are important and distinctive to state-building situations and discusses what research can potentially contribute.

While natural resource revenues ought to enable development, past experiences with the ‘Paradox of Plenty’ have shown that mineral and oil wealth often represents a curse rather than a blessing, inducing slower growth and higher levels of poverty. Many resource rich countries have high poverty rates and are among recipients of international aid. This paper looks at how lessons from successful resource rich countries can provide lessons for resource management. It also considers how international donors can act to facilitate such processes.

Whilst a continued emphasis from donors on reforms to improve the enabling environment within which businesses operate (BEE) is appropriate, there is also scope to seek new ways to partner business to accelerate pro-poor development, and by so doing, improve the effectiveness of BEE reform efforts. This paper argues that Enterprise Challenge Funds (ECFs) are an emerging instrument by which donors can directly encourage pro-poor outcomes from private sector activity, and also indirectly enhance the effectiveness and pro-poor focus of BEE reforms.

This 2011 Enterprise Challenge Fund (ECF) Annual Report highlights implementation progress, emerging impacts from funded business projects and the lessons learned to date.