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Women globally are 17% less likely to own a smartphone than men and even with mobile technology in a household, women are less likely to have the skills or confidence to use a mobile device and are less likely to have control over when and how they use it. These barriers are particularly acute for members of Village Savings & Loan Associations (VSLAs) who tend to be from the lowest income communities. For VSLA members, access to and usage of digital technology is limited due to cost, but also discriminatory gender norms that limit women’s ability to acquire basic digital skills and access to and use of technology. To address women’s digital exclusion, CARE developed a multi-pronged approach to delivering digital tools and skills to VSLA members, including enabling access to devices and addressing discriminatory norms. Two pilots commenced in September 2022, with 50 groups in Uganda and 50 groups in Rwanda. Through these pilots, CARE has conducted extensive research and is addressing social norms; facilitating access to devices; and delivering digital training.

Introduction

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.

An increasing body of evidence shows the importance of addressing social norms as an essential component of women’s economic power.

Growing evidence suggests that companies which increase women’s equitable participation experience overall business growth, stronger financial performance, and increased productivity. According to the evidence, these companies can attract the best talent, focus on innovation, and gain access to new and changing markets. To create a detailed review of what evidence currently exists, this study looks at policies, practices, and programs for increasing women’s equitable participation. 

An increasing body of evidence shows the critical importance of addressing gender-based violence (GBV) in the world of work as an essential component of women’s economic empowerment (WEE). GBV contributes to poverty, magnifies the gender gaps in labor force participation and pay, and affects advancement opportunities.

To address the lack of food safety certifications available at the SME level and validate the implementation of project trainings, Feed the Future Business Drivers for Food Safety designed the BD4FS Pre-HACCP Validation Badge program. Working with growing food businesses (GFBs) interested in earning a Validation Badge, BD4FS held specialized trainings, offered technical assistance, and organized a professional food safety audit of 21 Senegalese GFBs.

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

Safe food supports national economies and global trade, in addition to contributing to food security, nutrition, and sustainable development. Governments can facilitate a culture of food safety by creating clear food safety regulations, policies and an enabling environment where small and medium-sized enterprises can thrive. Ethiopia’s government has been continuously upgrading its food safety laws and regulations to meet the requirements of both international buyers and its fast-growing food retail and wholesale establishments.

In agricultural market systems development (MSD), a crucial debate has emerged—whether to adopt a crop-agnostic or a value chain-specific approach. Day 2 of the 2023 Market Systems Symposium explored this debate with insights from experienced professionals, shedding light on the complexities and considerations within this strategic decision-making process.

This blogpost is one in a series of blogs sharing insights gained from the Market Systems Symposium 2023. The MSS blogpost provides a brief snapshot of key insights shared across a number of different sessions in MSS 2023 held in Cape Town between 13-15 November 2023.

The blog provides an excellent case of how smallholders can be integrated into a high-value supply chain when the contexts are effectively considered. The example shows how context specific efforts the generate value will take off, and can emerge as an attractor that encourages ongoing change with knock-on effects. It is also important to recognize that there are concerns related to only working with a single firm.

The blog highlights the critically important learning function that in many parts of international development are quite weak. The blog provides an example of how practitioners in the area of employment and labor markets have realized the importance of learning and sharing across projects, countries, donors, etc. to accelerate the learning related to complex labor related challenges. While the blog does not focus on the importance of taking systems lenses, it is useful to note that systems thinking is a foundational element of the community of practice.

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 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.

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

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.

In a USAID/BHA-funded research project underway in Somalia’s Puntland State, the IRC is trying to understand how to design effective and equitable market support programming. Market support is a type of humanitarian intervention that aims to ultimately benefit crisis-affected populations by improving the function of critical market systems, like those for staple foods and key non-food items.

Blog #3: In Search of More Equitable Impact

The population of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is currently estimated at 1.2 billion people,1 and is projected to double by 2050. The continent’s smallholder farmers (SHF) account for 60% of the population,2 and produce 80% of the food consumed.3 These figures highlight the critical role that agriculture and SHF play in the continent’s food security and development.

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.