Blog

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.

How can implementers use blended finance to mobilize capital? Chemonics and LixCap share their experiences with sequencing and explore its potential.

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.

This post looks at how blockchain in agribusiness is making a positive impact already with real, live use cases and companies making cost-savings and improving efficiencies.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

MEL is not meant to focus just on project performance. Thus, the USAID-funded Feed the Future Mozambique Agricultural Innovations Activity has developed new MEL tools to assess whether business innovations are improving market system inclusiveness for smallholder farmers.

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.

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.

A Mozambique-based wholesaler of agriculture inputs and mechanization equipment received investment support through the Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation program.

How can donors play a role in helping companies adapt to these unpredictable environments? Partnering for Innovation’s pay for performance approach integrates adaptive management into the design of its partnerships agreements.

At ACDI/VOCA's Amplifying our Impact event at USAID, ACDI/VOCA highlighted several projects pivoting to a market systems approach across a variety of different geographies and contexts.

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.

USAID awarded a grant to CrossBoundary, LLC, based in Washington, D.C., to form a public-private partnership that provides catalytic financing for businesses in Sierra Leone. This financing will support adoption of solar energy practices and reduce demand on the country’s power grid.

SNV's "Enhancing Opportunities for Women Enterprises" (FLOW/EOWE) programme focuses on supporting rural women in entrepreneurship by addressing the systemic barriers that many rural women face when launching their businesses.

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.