Financing the Future of Asia: Innovations in Sustainable Finance

Around the globe, a wave of financial innovation that seeks to create social and environmental benefits while producing attractive returns is shaping the field of sustainable finance.From investments in publicly listed corporations based on environmental, social, and governance factors, to bonds issued to fund climate and environmental improvements; from micro-credit to small retailers through innovative credit assessments, to parametric insurance products improving the disaster resilience of countries, the world of sustainable finance is growing and becoming increasingly diverse.In this report, we take a closer look at these innovations and more, highlighting how they are working to mobilize private-sector capital at scale to address social and environmental challenges. We also explore recent developments and potential opportunities in Asia's four largest economies: China, India, Japan, and Indonesia

State of the Low-Income Housing Finance Market 2018

An innovative new model pioneered by affordable housing finance companies (AHFCs) has made home ownership attainable for millions of low-income informal sector customers in urban India. There are now 26 such AHFCs with a combined loan portfolio of $4.1+ billion in India, who have financed over 230,000 houses over the last decade. Due to the availability of equity and debt, and potential for geographic expansion, this market is likely to continue to grow rapidly. This report examines the current state of the market and provides recommendations for facilitating greater scale so that even more households can own or improve their homes

Bending The Arc: How The Full Spectrum of Capital Can Enable Inclusive Growth in Agriculture

While the world has made huge economic gains over the past 50 years, this progress has been highly uneven. This is particularly acute in the agriculture sector, with many of the 500 million smallholder farmers around the world living on meager incomes and facing high levels of economic insecurity.Despite some recent innovations and advances in including smallholders as market players, there have been few cases where truly widespread, market-level, transformative change towards inclusion has been achieved.In this report, we explore the role of different kinds of capital in bending the arc of agricultural market development towards inclusive growth. We pay particular attention to how impact-focused players deploying capital that is flexible in terms of risk-return expectations can best deploy it in order to catalyze large-scale transformations towards inclusion