Blog

Blog #3: In Search of More Equitable Impact

The Linkage Between Food Safety and Sustainability Food loss and waste pose a major threat to both global food system security and sustainability. Postharvest loss is both nutrient and resource loss. When food is wasted, so are the resources required to produce it, namely land, water, and energy. In Africa, with the world’s highest rates of hunger and malnutrition, about a third of all food produced is lost before it ever reaches consumers.

By Angela Hogg, Regional Environment Office Director, USAID/RDMA

Frenki Kozeli, Julian Guelig, and Dany Khy share three approaches to forming private sector engagement partnerships that can be replicated and tailored across development contexts.

Field research from from around the world is finding that resilience to climate-related shocks can encourage rural families to invest more for higher productivity, creating new opportunities for greater prosperity.

The Heifer International program in Nepal provided women with goats and training to facilitate sustainable escapes from poverty.

How PNG delivers power to its populace is important to the nation. The Development Strategic Plan calls for carbon neutrality by 2050.

Nine projects are funded by NWO-WOTRO to strengthen the Netherlands-CGIAR research partnership on generating insights that contribute to improving seed systems in focus regions within Asia and Sub-Sahara Africa.

In Pakistan, promising small and medium-sized enterprises are turning their innovative ideas into reality — and improving livelihoods — with a boost from a special grant fund.

Feed the Future Cambodia Harvest II is a five-year project, now at its halfway point, working to help Cambodia accelerate horticulture sector growth and strengthen the horticulture market system. This case study describes Harvest II’s blended buyer-led and market systems development approach, citing examples of progress to date and posing several learning questions about the project moving forward.

USAID’s Value Chains for Rural Development project uses an inclusive, market systems approach to support smallholder producers, farmer groups, agribusinesses, and community organizations.

Promising results are unfolding as project staff begin to think and work politically on one USAID project in Timor-Leste.

Growing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is an important goal of much donor assistance. However, development practitioners do not always articulate theoretical frameworks linking interventions to outcomes of sales or employment growth.

While women make up a large part of Bangladesh’s agricultural workforce, they are rarely at the forefront of commercial agriculture. Engaging women in more diverse agricultural activities could change this.

The Enhancing Opportunities for Women’s Enterprises programme and the Centre for Industry and Trade is implementing a strategy to facilitate access for rural women entrepreneurs to markets and strengthen linkages between different actors in selected agricultural value chains.

The Women in Agriculture Network (WAgN): Cambodia project teaches women who manage small farms ways to diversify their operations for improved nutrition.

Economic development programs are increasingly shifting to a system change approach instead of direct delivery service.

Women Empowerment in South Punjab through Investment in Rural Economy (WEinSPIRE) was selected as one of the winners of Chemonics’ recent innovation contest.

Flooding is a constant threat in many parts of Bangladesh where people’s livelihoods depend on a good crop. Microinsurance was designed to help at-risk farmers to increase their resilience to this threat.

Network analysis is often cited as a useful tool for analyzing market systems, but can be difficult for large networks. In Bangladesh, the USAID-funded Rice and Diversified Crops (RDC) activity tested an ego-net approach.

Read how private sector-led technical and entrepreneurial trainings are playing an important role in boosting women's economic empowerment in Bangladesh.

In the context of Bangladesh, two of the most influential informal norms are family loyalty and social hierarchy, and these norms permeate many layers of social interaction and structure, including market systems and businesses.

Learn how driving firms to to consider smallholder farmers as a more integral part of their business strategy results in a more inclusive input supply system.

Explore how reframing market systems as enabling environments with pockets of momentum, rather than a series of snapshot problems, can boost market systems change efforts.

When a market system isn’t humming along as it should, something must be missing. Read on for examples from Cambodia and Guinea.