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Women globally are 17% less likely to own a smartphone than men and even with mobile technology in a household, women are less likely to have the skills or confidence to use a mobile device and are less likely to have control over when and how they use it. These barriers are particularly acute for members of Village Savings & Loan Associations (VSLAs) who tend to be from the lowest income communities. For VSLA members, access to and usage of digital technology is limited due to cost, but also discriminatory gender norms that limit women’s ability to acquire basic digital skills and access to and use of technology. To address women’s digital exclusion, CARE developed a multi-pronged approach to delivering digital tools and skills to VSLA members, including enabling access to devices and addressing discriminatory norms. Two pilots commenced in September 2022, with 50 groups in Uganda and 50 groups in Rwanda. Through these pilots, CARE has conducted extensive research and is addressing social norms; facilitating access to devices; and delivering digital training.

Climate change has been a slow-moving risk for some time now, but what is often missed, which this blog points out, is that there are immediate consequences affecting most people around the world, especially the most vulnerable. As the blog highlights, increasing weather variability is a challenge for most smallholder farmers, including in Uganda. At the same time, the ability to effectively forecast weather has remained low, which creates a circumstance of increasing risks since erratic weather patterns mean farmers are often caught off guard damaging crops and reducing productivity.

The population of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is currently estimated at 1.2 billion people,1 and is projected to double by 2050. The continent’s smallholder farmers (SHF) account for 60% of the population,2 and produce 80% of the food consumed.3 These figures highlight the critical role that agriculture and SHF play in the continent’s food security and development.

This blog was originally posted on refileweb.

Localization is the recognition that local stakeholders know better what their challenges are and how to solve them than do traditional development practitioners. It necessarily positions local stakeholders as solution-makers and implementors while positioning development practitioners as facilitators, trainers, and networkers. 

This post was originally posted on the SCOPEinsight website.

As part of its work in Uganda, the USAID/Uganda Feed the Future Market System Monitoring (MSM) Activity applied a systems approach to understanding the Karamoja region, the focus of humanitarian and resilience programming in Uganda.

In March 2020, the Government of Uganda introduced a series of preventative measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the country. These measures, including the closure of businesses and restriction of movement, were anticipated to have an impact on the economy and on agricultural production. USAID/Uganda was interested in understanding the impact of COVID-19 and these government measures on the agricultural market system, to anticipate how resilient the system would be and to identify opportunities to adapt existing programming or introduce new emergency measures.

FROM SILICON VALLEY STARTUP TO LANDMARK ACQUISITION Access to technology is an essential component to development, especially in Africa. Africans use cheap mobile phones to pay their bills, conduct small business, and make calls anywhere and everywhere. However, even a small mobile phone is not useful if power is not available to charge it. Eighty percent of African households lack electric power, which limits opportunities to access information and mobile money, as well as business and educational opportunities. 

By Emily Langhorne, INVEST Communications Specialist  

The Feed the Future Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) and USAID Bureau for Resilience and Food Security undertook a study in Rwanda and Uganda to understand how to better engage youth in agriculture through EAS and the private sector.

Learn how USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures grantees are adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sylvia Natukunda is feeling the effects of COVID-19. As the founder of Farm Reap, a Kampala, Uganda-based company that produces five flavors of yogurt, she is putting together a game plan on how to keep her business profitable.

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.

Najib Seguya of the Feed the Future Uganda Youth Leadership in Agriculture (YLA) activity’s Strategic Activities Fund team discusses key considerations to keep in mind when designing a pay-for-results (PfR) program, also known as performance-based financing.

This post highlights critical questions about youth entrepreneurs and how to build an inclusive system that supports them through both financial and non-financial means.

As we prioritize making market systems more competitive, resilient, and inclusive for smallholder farmers and other market actors, we must connect our support for these actors with support for the all-encompassing yet elusive enabling environment around them.

HealthPartners has been helping Ugandans start sustainable health cooperatives since 1997. Three years ago, we shifted from input funding to results-based funding. That shift was a game changer in terms of project cost-effectiveness and cooperative autonomy.

USAID and UC Davis are partnering to establish the world's first quality certification for agricultural index insurance in Kenya. The QUIIC certification will help ensure that products for small-scale farmers across East Africa truly can promote long-term resilience.

By helping dairy cooperatives add a health cooperative product, with support from USAID’s Cooperative Development Program (CDP), HealthPartners were able to identify a single solution that addressed challenges in rural Uganda.

Explore three ways mobile money adoption can be improved.

Learn how system mapping can reveal connections between interventions and pathways for synergy in market facilitation practices.

Even in a good year, when the weather cooperates and pests are held at bay, the world’s farmers face another threat: prices.

Understanding how markets shape and are shaped by the broader system in which they are embedded is critical for making them work better for food-insecure families and poor farmers.

Learn how Graduation programs are emerging as a high-impact and sustainable approach to alleviating extreme poverty.