Enterprise Development and Microfinance
Instructions for authors

Scope
EDM is a journal aimed at practitioners and policymakers in the field of microfinance and enterprise development. Themes include microfinance institutions and their sustainability, poverty impact on clients and producers, business development services, value chain development, and the business environment. Readers of your article will want to learn about developments that are new and helpful for their work. For example:

• Articles should provide insights into how programmes might be run better, or what changes in policy are needed.
• Articles concentrating on analysis of how poor people manage their finances or their businesses should also include recommendations for how interventions might be improved.
• Articles describing particular projects in a given country should also include international comparisons, or at least some discussion of how local practice relates to what is done in other parts of the world.
• Readers are also interested in sustainability i.e. how much programmes cost to run, or financial products cost to offer on the market, and how far they are able to cover their costs with customer charges.

Articles should be between 3000 and 6000 words in length: articles covering specific projects and their experiences may be shorter, whereas more analytical overviews are often longer.

The editor welcomes authors sending in 100-150 word outlines of their proposed article for discussion and guidance prior to writing the full article.

Format
Please submit articles as a Word document containing the text, including title (up to 12 words), abstract (100–150 words), references, tables, boxes and figure captions.
Please also include one sentence on the author’s occupation. Acknowledgments are not encouraged but if it is important to include them, please keep them to one sentence.

References and footnotes
EDM does not have footnotes. Material of this type should either be incorporated into the text (possibly in brackets) or omitted.

References should be given in the Harvard style e.g. (Smith, 2001) in the text, together with, in a list at the end:

Smith, John (2001) ‘Microfinance performance indicators’, DFID report.

Please include the DOI number at the end of the reference if available.

Tables and illustrations
 Tables should be set up in Word
 Graphs or diagrams that were originally composed in Excel, should be linked as an object in the Word file, and furnished as a separate file. Data should be displayed in greyscale or with patterns rather than colours; they should be in 2-D rather than 3-D.
 Line images should be submitted black and white, no areas of solid grey; they should be two-dimensional and NOT three-dimensional. Ideally a drawing package such as Adobe Illustrator should be used, then they should be saved as tiff files, at a resolution of 600 dots per inch at the size you would like the diagram published or larger. If this is impossible, the diagram can be drawn in Word on a single A4 sheet, then printed out, scanned and saved as a tiff, at a resolution of 600 dots per inch. Please don’t include the Figure title in the tiff, this will be typeset later, but please use the number and title in the tiff file name to help with identification. Please supply each image as a separate tiff file.

Submission, editorial selection procedures and copyright assignment
Articles should be submitted as email attachments.
Once received, they will be acknowledged by the editor, who will check that the article is within the scope of the journal. They will then be read by at least two other reviewers. When the reviewers’ comments have been received, usually within 6 weeks, the editor will convey the decision of the reviewers to the author. Unless the decision is not to publish, the reviewers usually ask for some revisions or they have a few queries.
If it is agreed that the article is suitable for publishing, the final decision on which issue the article is most suitable for is made at the editorial committee meeting, approximately three months before the issue will be published. The editor then edits the article and prepares it for publication. She will send each author a single copy of the issue when it is published: please send her the postal address to which copies should be sent.
Articles should be submitted to the Editor, Clare Tawney, via email at publishinginfo@practicalaction.org.uk
The journal’s policy is to acquire copyright for all contributions. Once articles have been selected for publication authors will be sent a copyright assignment form which they should sign and return to the Practical Action Publishing office.

Payment and extra copies
EDM is published by Practical Action Publishing, part of the registered charity Practical Action, and we regret that we cannot pay authors.
We don’t distribute offprints or pdfs but authors who would like to order extra copies are eligible for an author discount and are invited to contact publishinginfo@practicalaction.org.uk