Blog

This post offers recommendations on managing the shifts in culture, management and partnering needed when a project shifts from providing direct services to a facilitative market systems approach.

In Moldova, the “golden triangle” of collaboration among industry, government, and academia is transforming the technology sector. Here’s the recipe for success from the Moldova Competitiveness Project.

In a five-part blog series, the Feed the Future Enabling Environment for Food Security project examines how the enabling environment shapes market systems outcomes. Each post spotlights a key area of the relationship and its relevance to informed program design and smart interventions.

This post explores the role of the enabling environment — the political economy in particular — in influencing the transition from personal exchange to impersonal exchange as a crucial step toward market transformation.

The world market for avocados is pretty much divided between Hass and green skin avocados.

In June, we're excited to take a look at political economy analysis (PEA), a development approach to inform programs and project activities from a politically-minded place.

In Nigeria, a Pay-for-Results prize competition incents use of Aflasafe to combat aflatoxin contamination and drive demand for higher-quality maize.

Growing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is an important goal of much donor assistance. However, development practitioners do not always articulate theoretical frameworks linking interventions to outcomes of sales or employment growth.

As USAID programs evolve to adopt a market systems approach, implementing partners must adapt their monitoring and evaluation approaches to better capture dynamics of complex systems change.

This is the second blog the Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation series on building private sector resilience. Stay tuned for the next blog in the private series, as we look at an example of how a more resilient company can provide critical technologies and value-added services after a natural disaster.

Applied political economy analysis can offer insights leading to recommendations about how to influence key decision-makers, thereby facilitating the change necessary to foster a more conducive enabling environment for market systems to thrive.

USAID's Economic Competitiveness Project is helping to provide technical assistance to micro and small companies in innovation, technology adoption, manufacturing practices, marketing, and more.

Strengthening grain contracts in Mali has the potential to open up farmers' access to products and services they need to operate and grow their businesses, achieving key agriculture development results in the process.

USAID/Honduras recently awarded a five-year (2018-2023) activity – Transforming Market Systems (TMS) to foster competitive, resilient, and inclusive market systems that provide increased economic opportunities that incorporate poor, marginalized Hondurans and reduce incentives to migrate.

To gear up for the 2019 Market Systems Symposium, let’s take a closer look at recent research exploring the relationship between measuring business and enabling environment change in market system development.

In Guatemala, USAID’s Creating Economic Opportunities project is working with the private sector and national and local authorities to strengthen economic growth and generate income and employment.

This blog introduces the Feed the Future Tanzania Land Tenure Assistance (LTA) project, which works with local banks to encourage new loan opportunities to improve farms and small businesses.

USAID is accepting submissions to the annual Collaborating, Learning and Adapting (CLA) Case Competition until Friday, April 12.

Policymakers throughout the world are emphasizing farmer cooperatives as a strategy to include smallholders in agricultural value chains and to enhance their incomes.

As we prioritize making market systems more competitive, resilient, and inclusive for smallholder farmers and other market actors, we must connect our support for these actors with support for the all-encompassing yet elusive enabling environment around them.

At ACDI/VOCA's Amplifying our Impact event at USAID, ACDI/VOCA highlighted several projects pivoting to a market systems approach across a variety of different geographies and contexts.

SNV's "Enhancing Opportunities for Women Enterprises" (FLOW/EOWE) programme focuses on supporting rural women in entrepreneurship by addressing the systemic barriers that many rural women face when launching their businesses.

In our pursuit of inclusive agriculture-led growth, we increasingly understand how important it is that we put more emphasis on youth.

This post originally appeared on Agrilinks and was authored by Kusi Hornberger.

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.