Blog

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.

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.

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.

Learn how a minimum quality standard for agricultural index insurance protects farmers, safeguards markets, and promotes sustainable resilience.

While these kinds of benefits can promote food security and resilience, effectively implementing agricultural index insurance in developing economies around the world has been a challenge.

Quality agricultural index insurance plays a valuable role in shifting the dynamics of poverty and resilience. This post is part two of a five-part series on agricultural index insurance for economic development.

The number of displaced people in the world is at an all-time high. Now, aid agencies and governments are looking to blockchain to enable humanitarian projects that give identity and aid assistance to refugees.

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.

Welcome to a five part series from the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Assets and Market Access. This first post introduces agricultural index insurance, its promise and pitfalls, innovations, and place in broader economic development and resilience efforts.

Donors and practitioners working in value chain and market development for the benefit of the poor have made significant progress in developing a better contextual and conceptual understanding of the complex and dynamic nature of market systems and their enabling environment contexts.

Blockchain can eradicate poverty in developing countries.

Some have found Africa’s participation in world trade to be low. However, a relatively well-developed literature argues that Africa’s trade has been in line with predicted trends and that the continent’s participation in international trade reflects its level of economic activity.

Strategic local planning and investment to facilitate housing, personal, and professional risk-taking, new market opportunities, and an entirely new vision of how housing could be delivered using the momentum of private initiative.

The Feed the Future NAFAKA II: Cereals Market System Development project, funded by USAID and implemented by ACDI/VOCA, developed a strategy to boost agricultural growth in Tanzania’s staple crops by helping individuals form producer organizations.

Growing anti-globalization sentiments and moves toward protectionism threaten to undermine the substantial benefits of global trade — particularly for food systems and nutrition — while doing nothing to address the problems associated with it.

Food safety remains essential to everyone, and blockchain alleviates some of the dangers to the food safety supply chain.

New results from pilot projects in the Mali and Burkina Faso cotton sectors show how index insurance can accelerate and protect growth for small-scale farmers, promoting long-term resilience both for their families and their local economies.

The specialty coffee trend highlights not only the U.S. consumers’ increased preference for higher quality coffee but also an interest in coffee farmers, as achieving higher quality starts with the producer. More than ever, consumers want to know their coffee’s bean-to-cup story.

We’ve seen how cryptocurrency can incentivize people to do incredible things, from fighting crime to trading surplus energy. But just when you thought you’d heard everything, along comes VeganCoin.

USAID is helping the Government of Tanzania to improve communities’ understanding of land rights, support village land use planning, and clarify, document and certify property rights.

In today’s sub-Saharan Africa investment needs framework, it’s likely that opportunity gaps will affect performance for in-demand areas that local livelihoods depend on.

The Feed the Future Enabling Environment for Food Security project is a buy-in mechanism where USAID Missions can rapidly secure top analysis and technical assistance to create an enabling environment for agricultural market systems.

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.