Fresh Ideas About Business in Emerging Markets
IFC combines six decades of experience with current expertise to share evolving concepts of development finance, from bond markets to blended finance and beyond, in a series of thought pieces and case studies.
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Explore the latest EMCompass publications:
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Mar 19, 2021
Artificial Intelligence in Emerging Markets - Opportunities, Trends, and Emerging Business Models – Second Edition
This report explores the latest AI applications and trends in emerging markets and includes several examples of how AI is expanding opportunities and contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. It also sheds light on how investors, clients, and governments can harness its full potential while minimizing its risks—when managed effectively and with safeguards in place, AI can facilitate private investment to reduce poverty and improve lives at a pace inconceivable only a decade ago.
English | 148 pages | IFC 2021
Mar 8, 2021
How Firms Are Responding And Adapting During COVID-19 And Recovery
The COVID-19 crisis has disproportionately affected the most vulnerable firms and individuals in emerging markets, especially women and low-income populations. These groups faced significant challenges to growth and prosperity before the pandemic, and COVID-19 has only exacerbated their plights, resulting in even wider global inequities, including a further increase in global financial and digital divides. The private sector has already begun to respond to the crisis—in sectors such as digital infrastructure, trade, power, and tourism, and with methods that cut across sectors, such as inclusive business models, disruptive technologies, social bonds, and private equity. This proves that businesses can play a vital role in amplifying the public and humanitarian response to the crisis, while supporting recovery and driving strategic growth going forward, and setting the stage for “building back better” post crisis. This report highlights opportunities for businesses in emerging markets t
English | 136 pages | IFC 2021
Feb 28, 2021
Blended Concessional Finance and COVID-19
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments, development institutions, and private companies are trying to find mechanisms to prevent the loss of essential economic activity under difficult and uncertain market conditions. In this context, blended concessional finance deployed by DFIs is already playing an even greater role than in the recent past, as it can help bridge critical financing gaps by placing important projects within the risk tolerance of private sector investors and DFIs, despite great market and financial uncertainty. Blended concessional finance will play a critical role to ensure that the response to the pandemic remains focused on the most difficult markets and, as efforts to rebuild are put in motion, the rebuilding is done in an inclusive and climate and gender-smart manner.
English | 8 pages | IFC 2021
Feb 3, 2021
Using Blended Concessional Finance to Invest in Challenging Markets—Economic Considerations, Transparency, Governance , and Lessons of Experience
This report examines IFC’s two decades of experience supporting pioneering projects with blended concessional finance. The report addresses issues such as why and when concessional finance is appropriate to support private sector projects; the key transparency, access, and governance processes required to implement projects efficiently and effectively; the principles for selecting and structuring projects; how to use blended concessional finance to invest in lower-income countries; and the different ways of structuring concessional finance facilities used by DFIs.
English | 64 pages | IFC 2021
Jan 6, 2021
Private Credit in Emerging Markets
Private credit broadly refers to nonbank lending to firms. Since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009, private credit has grown considerably. Although the phenomenon of private credit is more predominant in the United States and the United Kingdom, it is also a growing asset class in emerging markets. Private credit appeals to borrowers because of bespoke, structured solutions, longer maturities, greater flexibility, and ease of doing business. Investors also like private credit, because of its attractive risk-adjusted returns. The global economic shock resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has seen marked changes in production and consumption patterns in the real economy, with ripple effects in credit markets. Uncertainty and increased risk aversion spiked a rush to top up liquidity—the so-called ‘dash for cash’— primarily in the bank-intermediated credit and public capital markets.
English | 8 pages—January—Note 98 | IFC 2021
Jan 4, 2021
How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Advance Post-Secondary Learning in Emerging Markets
Tertiary and vocational learning is widely recognized as critical for all countries’ economic success. While progress has been made toward achieving the 4th United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) by 2030—“Ensure Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education and Promote Lifelong Learning for All”—a 2019 UN report shows that some 750 million adults are functionally illiterate. These statistics illustrate the enormous challenge of adequately preparing the workforce for rapid technological change that will require continual reskilling. Although machines with artificial intelligence are likely to replace millions of workers across the world, AI also has great potential to enable workers to keep up with technological change and remain employable. This note attempts to illustrates how AI can support post-secondary learning across the entire tertiary and vocational education sector in emerging markets.
English | 8 pages—January—Note 97 | IFC 2021
Dec 23, 2020
Innovation, Investment, and Emerging Opportunities in Today’s Textile and Apparel Value Chain
Textile and apparel manufacturing is a critical creator of formalized jobs, a well-known path to industrialization, and an enabler of value chain relationships that modernize economies and make them more complex. Today, value chains that support the textile and apparel industries are rapidly evolving. They are integrating new technologies, embracing workplace innovations, adopting sustainable efficiencies, and inventing products and processes to meet the changing demands of global consumers and markets.
English | 8 pages—December—Note 96 | IFC 2020
Dec 1, 2020
How the Tourism Sector in Emerging Markets is Recovering from COVID-19
This note explores the factors in specific tourism destinations that contribute to pandemic-related vulnerability, as well as the factors that support the resilience of the tourism sector. Examining all these factors together provides a snapshot of the countries as well as the subsectors that are most likely to recover first, as well as those that will require greater support to weather and recover from the crisis.
English | 8 pages—December—Note 95 | IFC 2020
Nov 20, 2020
Deep Tech Solutions for Emerging Markets
Deep tech companies aim to address the world’s biggest challenges. These include providing Internet access to the unconnected, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, significantly increasing productivity gains across industries, and helping to solve many other intractable problems, particularly in emerging market and developing economies. A deep tech company brings transformative technology from the lab to the market, and democratized research infrastructure and increased available funding has led to the rise of deep tech companies globally, including in emerging markets. Yet commercialization is critical to realizing the benefits of deep tech solutions, and deep tech firms often struggle to successfully commercialize their breakthroughs.
English | 8 pages—November—Note 94 | IFC 2020
Nov 11, 2020
Crowdsourcing the Future of SME Financing
This publication showcases best articles from SME practitioners globally on what SME finance will look like in 2030.
Nov 9, 2020
Using Natural Capital Approaches to Manage Shared Dependencies – Delivering Sustainable Development and Enhanced Resilience
This report underscores the urgency of action and shares ways that companies are using natural capital approaches to build sustainability and resilience in their business models, while also helping to make markets more sustainable and resilient. The report explores three distinct shifts taking place in the relationship between businesses and nature, and how businesses are integrating these shifts into strategic and operational decision-making. It also provides a landscape-level perspective that is increasingly important in key sectors such as agriculture, tourism, and infrastructure, and introduces market diagnostic tools that can help identify opportunities for shared solutions. The insights from these experiences show that shared solutions create shared value, and that this results not only in stronger resilience for all participants, but also a shared resilience across communities, landscapes, and markets.
English | 88 pages | IFC 2020
Nov 6, 2020
Impacts of COVID-19 on the Private Sector in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations
The COVID-19 pandemic is having a significant negative impact on the private sector in developing economies, and businesses and individuals in fragile and conflict-affected situations are among the most severely affected. The pandemic has evolved rapidly from a health emergency to a global economic crisis, spreading through the real sector and posing growing risks to financial systems. Notable sector-level impacts include supply- and demand-based shocks to infrastructure and private healthcare; disruptions to imports, exports, and global and local value chains; and declining agribusiness activity that threatens food insecurity, all leading to financial sector instability.
English | 8 pages — November — Note 93 | IFC 2020
Oct 23, 2020
How Natural Capital Approaches Can Support Sustainable Investments and Markets
Nature’s current decline, underpinned by unsustainable consumption and production patterns, population dynamics, deforestation, and land use change, is a clear risk to business, markets, and society. The way that businesses measure, value, relate to, and account for the interaction between nature and people must evolve, and quickly. This note underscores the urgency of action and shares ways companies can use natural capital approaches to help maintain both nature and their ongoing role in advancing prosperity and development in emerging markets.
English | 8 pages — October — Note 92 | IFC 2020
Sep 30, 2020
Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare in Emerging Markets
Significant investments in health technology, including those using digital health and artificial intelligence, are expected to contribute to bridging the health service gap in emerging markets, given the potential of these new innovations to reach underserved patients. Many health-tech innovators are integrating AI into their product solutions, with early examples showing promise in improving diagnoses, reducing costs, and enabling access to remote health services.
English | 8 pages — September — Note 91 | IFC 2020
Sep 24, 2020
Lessons for Electric Utilities from COVID-19 Responses in Emerging Markets
The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic shutdown have severely depressed electricity demand across the globe, with acute consequences for the revenues and financial health of utilities, as well as smaller providers of utility services and off-grid companies. In many places, utility service providers also must manage the inability of consumers to pay for their services. Government support has been forthcoming, but utilities need to work closely with policymakers to ensure that programs are carefully designed in order to maintain ongoing system reforms, competitiveness, and affordability, and avoid long-lasting market disruptions. These support measures should avoid redundancy among sectors and ensure that resources are efficiently allocated and that welfare improvements are fairly distributed across the country in a sustainable manner. Investors must also understand changes to utilities’ finances and should work to support further reforms.
English | 8 pages - September - Note 90 | IFC 2020
Sep 8, 2020
Artificial Intelligence in Emerging Markets—Opportunities, Trends, and Emerging Business Models
This report explores the latest AI applications and trends in emerging markets and includes several examples of how AI is expanding opportunities and contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. It also sheds light on how investors, clients, and governments can harness its full potential while minimizing its risks—when managed effectively and with safeguards in place, AI can facilitate private investment to reduce poverty and improve lives at a pace inconceivable only a decade ago.
English | 117 pages | IFC 2020
Aug 28, 2020
Social Bonds Can Help Mitigate the Economic and Social Effects of the COVID-19 Crisis
Social bonds have become an increasingly popular fixed-income product since the Social Bond Principles were published in 2017, and their growth and popularity have accelerated in recent months due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting need for new funding avenues to address the unforeseen economic and social disruptions. Since the outbreak of the crisis, global issuances of social bonds have risen considerably, and an increasing number of market participants have turned to IFC, a prolific and experienced issuer of social bonds, for advice on how to set up Social Bond Programs and Social Bond Frameworks. The hope now is that social bonds can become a significant method for financing projects that mitigate the socioeconomic impact of the current health crisis, and that the growing use of and interest in these bonds can be sustained post-crisis.
English | 8 pages – August – Note 89 | IFC 2020
Aug 24, 2020
What African Industrial Development Can Learn from East Asian Successes—The Role of Complexity and Economic Fitness
This note highlights the East Asian lessons that African nations, and Ethiopia in particular, are putting to use. These include focusing on competitiveness in select industries, acquiring know-how from global leaders, seeking foreign partners and investment, and developing a national strategy to create the industries of the future. The application of these lessons is also of interest to private investors, as it can allow them to identify the economies utilizing Economic Fitness analyses and thus offer opportunities for growth and investment.
English | 8 pages – August – Note 88 | IFC 2020
Jul 27, 2020
AI Investments Allow Emerging Markets to Develop and Expand Sophisticated Manufacturing Capabilities
As advances in machine learning, computer vision, and robotics help manufacturers around the world improve their processes and produce new and more complex products, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an integral tool of modern manufacturing, and one that is increasingly important to the industry’s future. By combining large volumes of data with the computing power to simulate human thinking, AI is increasing the efficiency, capacity, and complexity of factory floors, and is introducing robotics, the Internet of Things, and other cutting-edge innovations to manufacturing value chains across the globe.
English | 8 pages – July – Note 87 | IFC 2020
Jun 23, 2020
Leveraging Big Data to Advance Gender Equality
Achieving gender equality will require significant amounts of accurate data about the situations and struggles of women and girls. Globally, however, there is a major gap in data that is disaggregated by sex, and this gap often renders women’s societal, cultural, and economic contributions and obstacles practically invisible. It can also exacerbate existing gender divides, feeding and reinforcing biases in social programs, access to financial and other services, economic opportunities, and even development programs designed to address gender inequality. Part of the solution may be in the form of big data, which, if used effectively, can provide the volume of data needed to portray women and their situations accurately, which in turn can inform the creation of evidence-based solutions.
English | 8 Pages - June - Note 86 | IFC 2020
Jun 1, 2020
Artificial Intelligence Innovation in Financial Services
Artificial intelligence technologies are permeating financial services sectors around the world. The application of these technologies in emerging markets allows financial service providers to further automate their business processes and to leverage new and big data sources to overcome obstacles— including the high cost of serving rural and low-income customers and establishing customer identity and creditworthiness—that prevent the delivery of financial services to many consumers. Realizing financial inclusion benefits through the adoption of artificial intelligence relies on its responsible adoption by firms, on competitive market settings, and on continued investment in the necessary infrastructure.
English | 8 Pages - June - Note 85 | IFC 2020
May 20, 2020
Leveraging Inclusive Businesses Models to Support the Base of the Pyramid during COVID-19
The COVID-19 crisis is expected to roll back some of the progress made against global poverty over the last two decades, with the greatest impact on individuals at the base of the economic pyramid. Inclusive businesses that expand access to goods, services, and livelihoods for these individuals are responding to the crisis by reorienting and adapting their inclusive business models and operations. This note highlights seven actions that companies are taking to address needs at the base of the pyramid. We present their actions here as examples of what other businesses could do in response to the needs of those at the base of the pyramid.
English | 8 Pages - May - Note 84 | 2020 IFC
May 7, 2020
What COVID-19 Means for Digital Infrastructure in Emerging Markets
The COVID-19 pandemic shows that digital connectivity is critical to societal resilience and business continuity in times of crisis. For digital infrastructure providers in emerging markets, higher demand for connectivity may be counterbalanced by a series of negative shocks. These could affect broadband operators and smaller companies, leading to less competition, limited availability of open-access broadband infrastructure, and reduced technological innovation. However, the perceived value of digital connectivity is likely to rise, creating opportunities to implement policy reforms to accelerate the rollout of 4G and 5G. Digital infrastructure companies, however, may accelerate their migration toward diversified business models. Against a background of funding withdrawal from emerging markets, financing for smaller or independent companies in the poorest economies may require substantial support from development finance institutions to preserve competition, improve resilience, and pr
English | 8 Pages - May - Note 83 | 2020 IFC
May 5, 2020
Artificial Intelligence in Agribusiness is Growing in Emerging Markets
Business models utilizing artificial intelligence can help meet rising global demand for food and support a more inclusive and sustainable food system by: (1) enhancing the resilience of farming methods; (2) reducing the cost of quality inputs and services to underserved farmers; and (3) improving market access to facilitate smallholder farmer integration into regional and global supply chains. Although nascent in emerging economies, applications for artificial intelligence in agribusiness will proliferate as farmers’ access to the Internet and adoption of smart devices increases across low-income countries.
English | 8 Pages - May - Note 82 | 2020 IFC
Apr 28, 2020
Artificial Intelligence in the Power Sector
The energy sector worldwide faces growing challenges related to rising demand, efficiency, changing supply and demand patterns, and a lack of analytics needed for optimal management. These challenges are more acute in emerging market nations. Efficiency issues are particularly problematic, as the prevalence of informal connections to the power grid means a large amount of power is neither measured nor billed, resulting in losses as well as greater CO2 emissions, as consumers have little incentive to rationally use energy they don’t pay for. The power sector in developed nations has already begun to use artificial intelligence and related technologies that allow for communication between smart grids, smart meters, and Internet of Things devices. These technologies can help improve power management, efficiency, and transparency, and increase the use of renewable energy sources.
English | 8 Pages - April - Note 81 | 2020 IFC
