Rapidly growing midsize companies are an important segment of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and are critical providers of employment, innovation, goods, and services. Such midsize growth companies (MGCs) face many of the same sustainability challenges as larger firms but with more nascent organizational capacity and constrained physical capital, human capital, and financial resources. As a result, at least half of companies in emerging markets that experience a period of high growth exit the market altogether three to six years after the episode.
The Sustainability Assessment and Improvement Tool for Midsize Growth Companies is designed to help MGCs understand, prepare for, and respond to the economic, environmental, and social sustainability challenges that accompany rapid growth.
The tool consists of two parts:
- An Excel-based instrument that allows users to conduct a structured examination of a company’s current sustainability policies, practices, risks, and opportunities and identify priority actions tailored to its own business model and strategies.
- The User Guide summarizes the philosophy behind the main features of the Tool and orients users to apply it in ways that provide MGCs with practical solutions to their sustainability challenges.
The Tool adopts the approach to the evolution of SMEs set out in IFC’s SME Governance Guidebook.
