Blog

Feed the Future conducted a rapid market assessment of its roughly 150 partner agri-businesses and farmers to better understand the impact of the current crisis and the future outlook for the agriculture sector. 

The Heifer International program in Nepal provided women with goats and training to facilitate sustainable escapes from poverty.

Since the market for “bottom of the pyramid” consumers was identified nearly 20 years ago, product marketing, sales, and distribution have evolved with the help of technology. Here's how two businesses use mobile and cloud-based tools to reach emerging market customers.

Access to finance is a major pain point in market systems development, but how can we go beyond traditional financing methods to better reach agricultural businesses?

How PNG delivers power to its populace is important to the nation. The Development Strategic Plan calls for carbon neutrality by 2050.

The Lab for Applied Wheat Genomics aims to develop heat-tolerant, high-yielding, and farmer-accepted varieties for South Asia, while simultaneously increasing the research for development capacity of the global wheat improvement system.

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.

In Pakistan, promising small and medium-sized enterprises are turning their innovative ideas into reality — and improving livelihoods — with a boost from a special grant fund.

Feed the Future Cambodia Harvest II is a five-year project, now at its halfway point, working to help Cambodia accelerate horticulture sector growth and strengthen the horticulture market system. This case study describes Harvest II’s blended buyer-led and market systems development approach, citing examples of progress to date and posing several learning questions about the project moving forward.

USAID’s Value Chains for Rural Development project uses an inclusive, market systems approach to support smallholder producers, farmer groups, agribusinesses, and community organizations.

Promising results are unfolding as project staff begin to think and work politically on one USAID project in Timor-Leste.

Growing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is an important goal of much donor assistance. However, development practitioners do not always articulate theoretical frameworks linking interventions to outcomes of sales or employment growth.

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.

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.

The USAID Center for Resilience commissioned the Overseas Development Institute, in conjunction with the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN), to conduct research into resilience and poverty escapes in Nepal and other Feed the Future focus countries.

The Women in Agriculture Network (WAgN): Cambodia project teaches women who manage small farms ways to diversify their operations for improved nutrition.

Economic development programs are increasingly shifting to a system change approach instead of direct delivery service.

Women Empowerment in South Punjab through Investment in Rural Economy (WEinSPIRE) was selected as one of the winners of Chemonics’ recent innovation contest.

Flooding is a constant threat in many parts of Bangladesh where people’s livelihoods depend on a good crop. Microinsurance was designed to help at-risk farmers to increase their resilience to this threat.

Network analysis is often cited as a useful tool for analyzing market systems, but can be difficult for large networks. In Bangladesh, the USAID-funded Rice and Diversified Crops (RDC) activity tested an ego-net approach.

This post examines difficulties in measuring inequalities and differences in women's participation in the labor market as well as ways forward in the field.

Read how private sector-led technical and entrepreneurial trainings are playing an important role in boosting women's economic empowerment in Bangladesh.

In the context of Bangladesh, two of the most influential informal norms are family loyalty and social hierarchy, and these norms permeate many layers of social interaction and structure, including market systems and businesses.

Learn how driving firms to to consider smallholder farmers as a more integral part of their business strategy results in a more inclusive input supply system.