Blog

Do access to capital and business training effectively support microenterprises? USAID economist Anastasia de Santos takes a closer look at the data.

Let's be sure that we're not trading one vulnerability for another. Mercy Corps' Keith Proctor explains.

What is the relationship between market systems and resilience? Explore this "gray area" with USAID's Greg Collins.

Is "push/pull" just another buzzword, or is it a promising strategic approach? Anna Garloch of ACDI/VOCA argues that the answer lies somewhere in between the two.

Have the financial and business service sectors gone far enough to “read” the unique needs of agricultural small and medium enterprises? Find out what Chris Chibwana thinks.

How does one make sense of a messy and chaotic agricultural small and medium enterprise landscape? Check out these insights from Malawi.

Helen Bradbury calls for a gender data revolution to help counteract indifference.

Learn more about USAID/Senegal’s Projet Croissance Economique (PCE), which targets smallholders involved in rice, maize, and millet value chains.

Elizabeth Dunn investigates questions around systemic change in market systems.

For me, one of the big attractions of the value chain framework is the boxes: crisp blue boxes neatly lined up in rows. It makes economic development look so orderly and clearly defined.

Jason Wolfe, Senior Technical Advisor for the PEPFAR program, interviews Andrew Meaux and Barri Shorey from the IRC.

Where are the women entrepreneurs in Pakistan? Women entrepreneurs in Pakistan lead cutting-edge, innovative businesses – but there are far too few of them.

Richard Kohl from the Center for Large Scale Social Change presented findings from interviews with USAID’s recommendations and observations tracked closely with lessons learned at Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation (FTF-PI).

USAID’s Jim Yazman offers recommendations on how to implement a highly integrated approach to value chain development in the livestock sector, which is needed to meet an increasing demand for meat and dairy products from people in urban areas.

USAID’s Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Strategy recognizes that the disempowerment of women is one of the underlying systematic causes of malnutrition.

Access to finance remains one of the most common and most intractable development challenges. Whether your work focuses on improving agricultural yields for smallholder families, extending the reach of critical services

On April 30, USAID’s Leveraging Economic Opportunities (LEO) project stopped to take stock of advances made in its first seven months.

Through PISCES, the Program for Investment in the Small Capital Enterprise Sector, operational from 1979 to 1985, USAID and its partner organizations began to discover the principles of success for lending to the poor, opening the way for the microfinance industry.

Today we may take for granted the economic role of microenterprises and their place in a development program. But at the time these first studies and discussions were underway, development efforts were focused heavily on large firms in an effort to increase GDP through import substitution.

In this miniseries, USAID takes a look over the past 20-plus years at how the microfinance industry has evolved to embrace a broader financial inclusion agenda.

In honor of International Women's Day, and in recognition that gender is one of our largest cross-cutting issues, we're highlighting the most important tools, guidance, and other resources in moving gender equality forward across multiple sectors.

Designers, engineers, and innovators from around the world were challenged to envision fresh, creative designs that could benefit low-income households in developing countries, leading to entries from 13 countries.

LEO seeks to support missions and implementers in improving the performance of market systems to generate growth, and to structure that growth in such a way that it is inclusive of women and the extreme poor.

The USAID Kenya Dairy Sector Competitiveness Program (KDSCP).

Panelists Jay Banjade (Independent Consultant), Radha Rajkotia (International Rescue Committee), and Margie Brand (EcoVentures International) share cases from the field on expanding livelihood opportunities for the extreme poor through private sector engagement. This follows a session entitled, "PSE at the Bottom of the Pyramid" at the recent USAID/E3 Engaging the Power of the Private Sector for Development training course.