Blog

Mike Ducker answers remaining questions from the EcoSystem Forum on Building Social Capital.

USAID's Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and Environment (E3) Office of Forestry and Biodiversity is now accepting submissions for a case study competition on biodiversity integration across USAID's portfolio.

Learning from an initiative to help private maternity homes in Ghana survive the departure of the primary midwife-owner.

In Guatemala, USAID’s Creating Economic Opportunities project is working with the private sector and national and local authorities to strengthen economic growth and generate income and employment.

Women lead approximately one-third of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging markets but remain disproportionately underserved. They often face less favorable terms for financing and limited access to essential resources needed to build, sustain, and grow their businesses.

Among the entrepreneurs supported by USAID's Partnering to Accelerate Entrepreneurship (PACE) Initiative, those businesses that were owned by women grew both revenues and jobs significantly faster.

USAID is accepting submissions to the annual Collaborating, Learning and Adapting (CLA) Case Competition until Friday, April 12.

This week, Chief Economist Dr. Louise Fox, and Susan Wilder, Policy Advisor on finance and private sector development, celebrate the launch of the Agency’s new Private Sector Engagement Policy with a blog on why economic analysis is critical for effective implementation.

The new USAID-funded YouthLead.org platform is a new collaboration marketplace where young changemakers aged 15-35 can forge connections with a growing community of peers and partners.

As program strategies align towards inclusive, competitive market transformations, how can we support women’s participation, performance, and benefits as agri-entrepreneurs and agricultural wage workers?

Policymakers throughout the world are emphasizing farmer cooperatives as a strategy to include smallholders in agricultural value chains and to enhance their incomes.

Read about the winners from the Accelerating Women Entrepreneurs Award.

In USAID, we need to worry more about aging populations than we do now. That includes, for those still in their working-age years, how to work longer, healthier, and smarter.

Reflecting on emerging themes from the 2018 Making Cents International Global Youth Economic Opportunities Summit, here are four steps to promote new economic opportunities for girls.

For poor women around the world, their two hands are often their most important ticket out of poverty. If they can find paid wage work in the same way that men do, it not only improves their own physical welfare, but also contributes to greater GDP growth.

Sat4Farming uses a digital farm development plan to provide cocoa farmers with detailed information on their farms, such as a profit and loss statement, and helps guide their investment decisions.

In West Africa, young people are struggling to find viable jobs in their communities. The myAgro program encourages them to become entrepreneurs by employing them to work with farmers and savings groups.

An innovative approach to developing a sustainable seed system in cassava that simultaneously incentivizes all the stakeholders across the value chain is being implemented in Nigeria.

This post originally appeared on Agrilinks and was authored by Kusi Hornberger.

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.

In 2016, the Global Communities' USAID Cooperative Development Program piloted a project in Nairobi to work with young, urban professionals interested in starting their own cooperative businesses.

Rwandan women perform the majority of the country’s agricultural labor, and represent 70 percent of those who make their living from agriculture. Yet, the productivity of their work, and their integration within market systems, lags behind that of men.

The USAID Agro Horizon project helped young entrepreneurs set up a dried fruit processing facility to produce trail mix, which allowed them to enter new supermarket chains and develop business skills.

The Victory Against Malnutrition Project (ViM) was established to is reduce food insecurity by increasing and diversifying agricultural and livestock production, improving farmers’ incomes and household health and nutrition.