Blog

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.

In Sri Lanka, micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) face an estimated $17 billion financing gap. Women-led enterprises comprise a significant proportion of this financing need and face greater barriers in accessing finance.

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.

Blog #3: In Search of More Equitable Impact

The Linkage Between Food Safety and Sustainability Food loss and waste pose a major threat to both global food system security and sustainability. Postharvest loss is both nutrient and resource loss. When food is wasted, so are the resources required to produce it, namely land, water, and energy. In Africa, with the world’s highest rates of hunger and malnutrition, about a third of all food produced is lost before it ever reaches consumers.

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.”

Sri Lanka’s socioeconomic situation continues to worsen with rising costs and increased challenges in imports and exports due to ongoing supply chain disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. The country’s traditional artisans and the handloom industry have been hit hard.

USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance provides life-saving support to vulnerable and hard-to-reach people. the USAID ADVANCE project supports the mandate of Indonesia's National Disaster Management Authority.

USAID CATALYZE Private Sector Development Activity Provides COVID-19 Relief Grants to Build Resilience and Adaptability in Sri Lanka's Apparel Sector.

In the way that cooperatives form when people with common interests come together, apex organizations form when several of those cooperatives organize to achieve common goals. Farming cooperatives have the unique advantage of being engrained in the local context and knowledgeable about their sector. Their value is providing farmers with advantages that make them more profitable than they would be outside of the group. Apex organizations take that farmer support a step further by strengthening the cooperative groups on a larger scale. 

In early 2020, the Feed the Future Bangladesh Rice and Diversified Crops Activity, funded by USAID and implemented by ACDI/VOCA, began an assessment to understand how the Activity could increase financial access for agricultural small- and medium-sized enterprises (agri-SMEs) in Bangladesh during COVID-19. The assessment originally focused on opportunities for the Activity to increase financial access through agent banks during the pandemic.

When Hurricane Dorian struck The Bahamas in 2019, USAID led and coordinated the U.S. Government’s disaster response efforts, deploying an elite disaster team and providing nearly $34 million in humanitarian assistance.

Third in a series of five blogs on the factors that contribute to sustaining and scaling private sector partnerships from the Enduring Results Study 3.0

Over 67 million youth are unemployed globally and the majority live in rural areas with limited economic opportunities. The fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmingly impacted youth whose employment fell by more than twice that of adults in 2020.

This post was originally published on Helvetas' website and written by Chalachew Gebeyehu, SKY Project Manager, Helvetas; Bettina Jenny, Head of Skills Development & Education, Helvetas; and Sabrina Würmli, Advisor for Skills Development, Helvetas. 

(Second in a series of five blogs about the drivers of sustainability in USAID partnerships with the private sector based on the Enduring Results Study 3.0)

By Angela Hogg, Regional Environment Office Director, USAID/RDMA

Worldwide, the private sector is playing an unprecedented role in shaping opportunities that improve the lives in the countries and communities that USAID supports. For six decades, USAID has partnered with the private sector to solve the world’s most complex development challenges and to help countries accelerate development progress. 

As COVID-19 circumvented the globe impacting every nation, sector, business, and family, it brought numerous challenges in its wake.  In developing countries – where market systems are often fragmented, connections between market actors weak, and businesses’ reserves limited – perishable products like vegetables were particularly hard hit. Both the supply and demand were affected by the shock. As the crisis deepened, some market actors lost considerable revenue and some went out of business.

Banks in Bangladesh are exploring agent banking and digital services as ways of coping with COVID-19 restrictions, expanding financial inclusion to those in need, and preventing the gap in microfinancing from widening further.

Youth — who make up a large portion of the potential workforce in developing countries — are often left out of markets systems, representing a significant lost opportunity to deliver social and economic benefits. 

Frenki Kozeli, Julian Guelig, and Dany Khy share three approaches to forming private sector engagement partnerships that can be replicated and tailored across development contexts.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures national governments around the world are taking to contain it have created new challenges for families who were already vulnerable to a number of climate-related disaster risks. New research supported by USAID is learning whether investments in broadly based resilience helps families to withstand even this completely unexpected and global shock.

Field research from from around the world is finding that resilience to climate-related shocks can encourage rural families to invest more for higher productivity, creating new opportunities for greater prosperity.

The White House–led Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative brings new energy and a comprehensive approach to our mission at USAID.