Blog

Third in a series of five blogs on the factors that contribute to sustaining and scaling private sector partnerships from the Enduring Results Study 3.0

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.

USAID’s Bureau for Policy, Planning and Learning Senior Economist Peter Richards reflects on the potential impact of a global recession and drop in commodity prices on economic growth in the global south.

This post shares thoughts from Dr. Michael Kremer on an experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. Dr. Kremer directs USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures program and is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

The vast majority of food grown in Africa is by smallholder farmers. Implementing these four recommendations will speed up the process of putting improved seed in the hands of Africa’s food growers permanently.

A constraint to raising agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa is the lack of commercial availability of high-quality seed of improved modern crop varieties. Stakeholders have made a great effort to develop regional variety catalogs to increase the supply of high-quality seed.

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.

CIAT supports the development of seed systems uniting actors along the value chain to create sustainable seed systems and spur links with formal seed producers.

USAID/Mozambique engaged in programming, assessing, and leading critical climate change technical assistance activities that support low-emission development strategies (LEDS), building climate change resilience, and strengthening local capacity.

Power Africa teamed up with USAID INVEST to increase access to solar home systems and mini-grids across Kenya. Through Azuri Technology's pay-as-you-go-model, they are projected to provide 390,000 new connections and 6,000 upgraded connections across the country.

KATA Solar is one of a dozen Ghanaian companies offering rooftop solar. Sales of solar products in West Africa’s off-grid energy access market jumped by nearly one-third in the first half of 2017.

This post explores how USAID is mobilizing institutional investors to develop Africa's infrastructure through an initiative called MiDA, which connects American investors to the local partners.

As Marketlinks examines Pay-for-Results this August, check out this blog from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) highlighting compact designed to reduce poverty through economic growth in Cabo-Verde.

This is the third blog in the Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation building private sector resilience blog series.

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.

Market systems that inhibit productivity growth and depress livelihoods are familiar enough across the developing world. Barriers to improvement that turn out to be fundamentally political are two-a-penny.

Congratulations to the three winners from the Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) competition! These case studies demonstrate the use of CLA in the economic growth sector.

In this post, read about how Feed the Future's Accelerating Women Entrepreneurs (AWE) Prize selected Reel Fruit to receive acceleration services. ReelFruit is dried fruit and nuts packaging and distribution business in Nigeria.

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.

Learn about innovations in agricultural index insurance to help build a future of prosperity and resilience for small-scale farmers and pastoralists worldwide.

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.

While these kinds of benefits can promote food security and resilience, effectively implementing agricultural index insurance in developing economies around the world has been a challenge.

Some have found Africa’s participation in world trade to be low. However, a relatively well-developed literature argues that Africa’s trade has been in line with predicted trends and that the continent’s participation in international trade reflects its level of economic activity.

The Feed the Future NAFAKA II: Cereals Market System Development project, funded by USAID and implemented by ACDI/VOCA, developed a strategy to boost agricultural growth in Tanzania’s staple crops by helping individuals form producer organizations.

New results from pilot projects in the Mali and Burkina Faso cotton sectors show how index insurance can accelerate and protect growth for small-scale farmers, promoting long-term resilience both for their families and their local economies.