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Communities expressed diverse interests regarding how they wanted to receive assistance. Some community members said they were happy receiving aid in the form of vouchers while others wanted cash. What was interesting was that the underlying reason was the same–convenience and choice–but what was convenient for some members who were closer to stores was not as convenient for the others who were more remote.

The final blog in this series inspired by the four take-away messages from USAID’s primer on private-sector engagement in fragile and conflict-affected situations demonstrates why going beyond financial support is essential to provide partners with the coaching, networking, and advocacy needed to succeed in particularly complex, fragile and conflict-affected environments. It draws on the experience of the Strengthening Livelihoods and Resilience Activity in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

This blog, the third in a series inspired by the four take-away messages from USAID’s primer on private-sector engagement in fragile and conflict-affected situations, focuses on the Strengthening Livelihoods and Resilience Activity's experience vetting private-sector actors as potential development partners in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo where a paucity of enterprise data, low standards for company operations, and an absence of familiar business norms make it difficult to apply a typical approach to partner prospecting.

This blog, the second in a series inspired by the four take-away messages from USAID’s primer on private-sector engagement in fragile and conflict-affected situations, focuses on managing private-sector actors who are problematically invested in maintaining a fragile, humanitarian-dependent socioeconomic system dominated by conflict. It describes the strategy of the Strengthening Livelihoods and Resilience Activity for selecting partners and co-creating activities with communities in a conflict-sensitive way in the eastern DRC and explores the team's discomfort with some aspects of the 'bad actor' paradigm.

This blog, the first in a series inspired by the four take-away lessons from USAID’s primer on private-sector engagement in fragile and conflict-affected situations, focuses on adding social inclusion and conflict sensitivity as a third dimension to shared value in the partnerships of the USAID Strengthening Livelihoods and Resilience Activity in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

How to measure LGBTQIA+ inclusive market systems development

Around the globe, communities are faced with complex challenges and facilitating and sustaining peace remains of critical importance. While peacebuilding programming is implemented throughout the world, little is known about the overall impact and return on investment of these programs. Historically, program evaluations in this field (and in international aid and development broadly) have offered information on outputs, for example the number of people who participated in training, but this information remains insufficient to truly understand the impact.

This blog was originally posted on Climatelinks as a collaboration during COP28.

In a three-part blog series, we share lessons on the process of evaluating the Cambodia Feed the Future Harvest II program focused on what systemic changes the program made progress on in the horticulture sector. (Full report here). The lessons are:

In the dynamic landscape of international development, the intersection of market systems development (MSD) and conflict presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Several conversations on Day 1 at the Market Systems Symposium 2023 centered around MSD and conflict, drawing on experiences from Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Nigeria.

Climate change has been a slow-moving risk for some time now, but what is often missed, which this blog points out, is that there are immediate consequences affecting most people around the world, especially the most vulnerable. As the blog highlights, increasing weather variability is a challenge for most smallholder farmers, including in Uganda. At the same time, the ability to effectively forecast weather has remained low, which creates a circumstance of increasing risks since erratic weather patterns mean farmers are often caught off guard damaging crops and reducing productivity.

In this three-part blog series, we share lessons on the process of evaluating the Cambodia Feed the Future Harvest II program focused on what systemic changes the program made progress on in the horticulture sector. (Full report here). The lessons are:

In this blog post in the Equitable Inclusion series by the Canopy Lab, I spoke with USAID FTF Transforming Market Systems Activity (TMS) Deputy Chief of Party, Dun Grover, about the crucial role their inception phase played in shaping how they, as a market systems develop

If you’ve ever tried to evaluate the extent of system change, you know it’s a fascinating—but tricky—process.

This blog is written by Laura Kim and Michelle LeMeur of the Canopy Lab for the Feed the Future Market Systems and Partnership (MSP) Activity. How does one know if their studies have had any influence in the real world? With the COVID-19 pandemic in the rearview mirror (for many), we set out to answer this question following the dissemination of our 2021 and 2022 studies on the impact and implications of the pandemic on the global development workforce.

What does protecting watersheds have to do with the coffee market system? Surprisingly, a lot! Since 2014, Catholic Relief Services’ (CRS) Blue Harvest Program has worked with local partners in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua to restore water resources and transform coffee livelihoods. The mountainous, coffee-producing areas of Central America provide drinking water for millions of people. As land degradation and climate change threaten coffee production and contribute to growing water scarcity, the link between the coffee market system and natural resource management has never been more important.

The United States Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security (2023) envisions a world in which women and girls in all their diversity are equally able to contribute to and benefit from economic growth and development. U.S. Department of State (2023). United States Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/U.S.-Strategy-on-Global-Womens-Economic-Security.pdfThis includes equal access to quality education, better jobs and decent work.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems to search, sort, and analyze data has become increasingly common among governments looking to improve the delivery of financial, health, and education services to their citizens. In the case of the Secretariat of Education of the State of Guanajuato (SEG) in Mexico, a digital approach was particularly urgent as the community continues to grapple with increasing student drop-out rates — over 40,000 students every year.

The blog is authored by John Rachkara, Deputy Chief of Party, Rural Resilience Activity.

This blog is jointly authored by Christiana Stephen Wakawa, Senior Intervention Lead – Microenterprises Support of the Rural Resilience Activity, and John Rachkara, Deputy Chief of Party of the Rural Resilience Activity.

This post was authored by Alexandra Klass of USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA). We know the power of the Graduation Approach and its impressive results that lift the ultra-poor out of poverty, but can it also be successful for people living in humanitarian crises and displacement?

This post was authored by William Martin of USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), Laura Meissner of USAID BHA and the University of Arizona, and Melanie Mason of USAID BHA.

This blog is authored by John Rachkara, Deputy Chief of Party of the Rural Resilience Activity, John Daudu Ebile, Senior MIS/T4D Officer of the Rural Resilience Activity.

CARE’s Farmer Field and Business School (FFBS) model focuses on improving small-scale farmers’ productivity, resilience, and access to markets. FFBS is a hands-on, learning-by-doing approach through which groups of farmers meet regularly during the course of their value chain production cycle to learn about new agricultural techniques and to experiment these treatments on group-managed demonstration plots. Since 2014, FFBS has directly improved the lives of more than 2.5 million farmers and their families.

This blog was authored by Tess Bayombong, Maria Adelma Montejo, Emily Janoch, Caitlin Shannon, and Tzusuan Peng. Women entrepreneurs who talk about success in their businesses in the Philippines have fascinating contributions to what success means. Cecile Corio describes an arc of resilience and equality: “I think of ways to recover (my business). Don’t lose trust in yourself. I started from nothing; I can prove that I can lead a better life. … My husband and I have a good give-and-take relationship.”