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Mandera County, the second poorest county in Kenya, grapples with recurrent drought, seasonal flooding, violent extremism, and economic alienation from the rest of the country. Over 89 percent of Mandera’s 900,000 residents live below the poverty line.

The December 7, 2023 Finance Champions meeting featured four finance-focused presentations on:

Society Development Committee, or SDC, based in Faridpur, Bangladesh, is a microfinance partner of the Feed the Future Bangladesh Livestock and Nutrition Activity, funded by USAID and implemented by ACDI/VOCA. Through this partnership, thousands of people working in Bangladesh’s livestock sector have benefited from microfinance products.

Accessible finance is vital for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Yet, oftentimes, they struggle to access financing from traditional sources because they lack the knowledge to produce comprehensive financial documentation required by banks. Meanwhile, financial institutions may perceive small businesses as higher risk clients due to their size, limited track record, and insufficient collateral. In many countries, like Rwanda, financial institutions have limited knowledge in the livestock value chain financing opportunities compared to crops value chain.

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.

In rapid response to the abrupt trade disruptions resulting from Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea—a tactic in its war on Ukraine, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched the Agriculture Resilience Initiative (AGRI)-Ukraine. AGRI-Ukraine is critical to supporting Ukraine’s export and agricultural sector needs, which are expected to remain vulnerable to the Russian Federation’s aggression in the months and years to come.

The Finance Champions group was established in March 2023 with the aim to share innovative approaches being tested by USAID Missions, Bureaus and Independent Offices and to exchange learning on the topic of mobilizing finance in development. This group, which is internal to USAID, meets every six weeks, and has grown from an initial group of 20 to 160 members.

Developed through a partnership between the USAID and Mastercard, Project Kirana focused on helping women micro entrepreneurs gain the tools they need to grow their businesses in India. Project Kirana recognized the complex set of problems encountered by women micro entrepreneurs in India: limited business and digital financial capabilities, and limited access to formal financial services. By equipping women entrepreneurs with the knowledge and tools they needed — including financial and digital literacy expertise, business management skills, and strategies for addressing cultural barriers — over 2,500 women were able to grow their small retail businesses and increase their incomes.

Lack of access to finance is universally regarded as one of the most significant constraints to economic development. Without affordable and appropriate capital, Northern Kenyan individuals and micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are prevented from participating in the formal economy, capitalizing on business opportunities, investing in their livelihoods, and responding to shocks, such as natural disasters.

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

What if I told you that the financial sector has been favoring the wrong gender - that often women entrepreneurs are a better credit-risk than men and their businesses have higher returns?

The blog provides a summary of how MSR analysis can provide important insights into local contexts that should shape how activities are designed and implemented. The case of Haiti is of particular interest in that the various forces and factors affecting how smallholders manage risks from shocks and stresses have had a profound effect on how they engage market systems. As the authors explain, the MSR analysis provided insights into how smallholders manage a portfolio of animals to cope with such a dynamic and uncertain context.

Have you ever wanted to see where USAID provides funding, or what USAID invests in?

In the second blog in the series, the authors focus on the importance of using a retail distribution market systems lens to gain insights into the business realities of selling construction products and services to low-income customer segments. For example, low-income customers buy in smaller lots and often have important considerations related to decision-making, coping strategies, and trust that require specific business strategies and tactics. The blog examines a few examples from TCIS’s work in relation to how they applied systemic thinking related to retail distribution to improve housing outcomes for incremental builders.

This post was written by Habitat for Humanity's Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter and was Originally Published on the Vikāra Institute's website.

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.

Does economic growth improve food security? The short answer is no. Although mainstream economics suggests that sustainable economic growth is essential for ensuring global food security, empirical evidence is mixed, at best. Over the past decade, the world saw notable economic growth with decreasing global economic inequality between countries, yet food insecurity continued to rise.

This post was written by Habitat for Humanity's Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter and was originally published on the Vikāra Institute's website.

Start-ups and fast-growing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) need financing to grow—and that financing must be affordable. Yet, the return on investment that finance providers, such as banks and investors, require (to cover their costs and risks) often exceeds what SMEs can afford.

How Feed the Future Business Drivers for Food Safety is building capacity for small- and medium-sized food businesses to be leaders in food loss solutions

Around the world, donors like USAID are focused on helping small businesses thrive. These businesses create the lion’s share of formal jobs in emerging markets, and they provide the goods and services local communities need. Still, many small businesses struggle to grow because they can’t access the financing they need. Enter transaction advisors: private sector firms that work with small businesses and investors, structuring and closing investment deals between them.