We launched the Small Firm Diaries because after decades of work trying to help microenterprises to grow into small firms, there was still very little work to describe and understand existing small firms . Given the dearth of data on small firms we created a simple dividing line between micro and small: at least one paid worker. Our delineation between small and medium was a bit more nebulous: no full-time, non-owner managers (we used less than 20 paid workers as a fuzzy prox

To mark International Workers Day, we’re sharing findings and data we collected about employment and jobs in the Small Firm Diaries.

This chart displays data on account usage from our analysis of businesses in the first 4 countries we studied in the Small Firm Diaries—Colombia, Nigeria, Kenya, and Indonesia. Across these countries, we found that most of the small firms are “banked;” that is, the majority of firms in every country had a bank account and used it at least once. But far fewer used that account for the majority of their transactions. Instead, most firm owners still rely heavily on cash. While m

The 2021 Global Index found that Covid has driven the growth of digital payments worldwide, including an increase in digital payments to merchants. How are these global trends playing out in our sample of small firms? In this video we created for Financial Inclusion Week, we sift through data to tell the story of businesses straddling the borderlands between the cash and digital economies. We look into the accounts and transactions of a handful of firms in Nigeria and Colom