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Biljana Stanisavljva started her small business in Serbia in 2011, growing wheat and corn as a smallholder farmer. She wants to grow her business, but like many agricultural entrepreneurs, she finds it very challenging to obtain funds for her expansion plans. And as a woman, she faces additional challenges. Even after a decade as a registered business owner, she still has to rely on her husband for most business decisions. 

This blog outlines the rationale behind the business cases developed through the USAID Mozambique Feed the Future Agricultural Innovations Activity (FTF Inova).

This blog is part of the WomenConnect Challenge Blog Series: Introducing Strategies for Closing the Gender Digital Divide. USAID’s WomenConnect Challenge (WCC) is a global call for solutions to improve women’s participation in everyday life by meaningfully changing the ways women access and use technology.

This post was written by Holly Lard Krueger. This month on the Market Corner, I find common ground with two human rights advocates from completely different international development fields by exploring issues of equity and inclusion in supply chains and the application of systems thinking.

This blog is part of the WomenConnect Challenge Blog Series: Introducing Strategies for Closing the Gender Digital Divide. USAID’s WomenConnect Challenge (WCC) is a global call for solutions to improve women’s participation in everyday life by meaningfully changing the ways women access and use technology.

Stockouts and shortages of quality-assured medical products — including those required to prevent maternal and child deaths, and combat and control infectious disease threats — are still common in many countries despite being critical for saving lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted global health supply chain vulnerabilities, including an overreliance on a small number of suppliers for key active pharmaceutical ingredients, as well as on a large concentration of pharmaceutical manufacturing in Asia.

Hear why building bridges between LGBTQI+ people and the private sector is essential to inclusive development.

The global development community are increasingly looking to Multistakeholder Initiatives (MSIs), or Alliances, to mobilize public and private partners and increase development impact.

WomenConnect Challenge Blog Series: Strategy 2 — Creating Economic Opportunities

This is the second installment of The Market Corner's series on applying a systems approach to e-businesses, which unpacks key lessons from the private sector side of e-business to help inform market systems development interventions. Read the first post here.

This post is the forth in Marketlinks' ecommerce series and is authored by Kati Suominen, Founder and CEO, Nextrade Group and Technical Director, eTrade Alliance. Access the first, second, and third posts.

This blog is part of the WomenConnect Challenge Blog Series: Introducing Strategies for Closing the Gender Digital Divide. USAID’s WomenConnect Challenge (WCC) is a global call for solutions to improve women’s participation in everyday life by meaningfully changing the ways women access and use technology. In the first round of the Challenge, WCC awarded nine grants to organizations working to identify and change the social and economic circumstances that keep women offline and under-empowered.

This post is the third in Marketlinks' ecommerce series and is authored by Kati Suominen, Founder and CEO, Nextrade Group and Technical Director, eTrade Alliance. Access the first and second posts.

This month, the Market Corner takes a look at one e-business leader's experience applying a systems approach to grow her businesses. What can more than a decade of experience implementing market systems development (MSD) programs in Nigeria and Bangladesh teach a rising e-business entrepreneur?   Talking the talk and walking the walk.

“All technology has potential when modeled in the vacuum of our whiteboards and proposals,” remarks Revi Sterling, Director of the USAID WomenConnect Challenge (WCC). Shrewdly cutting to the chase, Sterling adds: “[But] rural smallholder farmer women do not live in vacuums.” In other words: for digital technologies to be part of any development solution, practitioners must first address the myriad of real-life barriers and inequities surrounding technology use.

This post is the second in Marketlinks' ecommerce series and is authored by Kati Suominen, Founder and CEO, Nextrade Group and Technical Director, eTrade Alliance. Read the first post here.

As connectivity grows, digital technologies are transforming the Indo-Pacific region. The Southeast Asia region grew from 360 million internet users in 2019 to 400 million in 2020.

This post was authored by Kati Suominen, Founder and CEO, Nextrade Group and Technical Director, eTrade Alliance. This January, the Alliance for eTrade Development (“eTrade Alliance”) will be taking over Marketlinks, sharing experiences from its two years of implementation and making the case for why enabling ecommerce should be at the forefront of the development agenda.

Earlier this month, I spoke with market systems development (MSD) expert Mike Klassen and two MSD leaders, Nina FitzSimons CEO of PRISMA, a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade-funded program in Indonesia, and Bidowra Khan, Team Lead for Social Inclusion and Support Market Systems for the USAID Feed the Future Rice and Diversified Crops Activity in B

Reflections from Katie Garcia, Deputy Director of USAID’s Private Sector Engagement Hub, and Kristin O’Planick, Market Systems Team Lead in USAID’s Bureau for Resilience and Food Security. There is a growing amount of convergence between PSE and MSD. For practitioners of either approach, there is value in learning more about the tools and techniques of the other to see how they can be useful in advancing the shared goal of transformational change.

Throughout December, Marketlinks has shared the top market-led development content from 2021, including the most-read blogs and the most

In emerging markets, entrepreneurs of growth-stage companies often struggle to access financing. Debt is hard to come by and securing equity often requires giving up significant company ownership in return.

An abridged version of this article was published in Devex. Read it here. By Vanessa Holcomb Mann and Jessamy Nichols, USAID INVEST Donors like USAID have added a powerful tool to their toolbox: catalytic funding.

By Yasmine Williams, INVEST Senior Communications Advisor South Africa is home to millions of small and medium-sized enterprises. These businesses create jobs and drive economic growth — they are vibrant, innovative, and undercapitalized.