Blog

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.

Learning from an initiative to help private maternity homes in Ghana survive the departure of the primary midwife-owner.

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

As program strategies align towards inclusive, competitive market transformations, how can we support women’s participation, performance, and benefits as agri-entrepreneurs and agricultural wage workers?

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.

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.

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.

USAID awarded a grant to CrossBoundary, LLC, based in Washington, D.C., to form a public-private partnership that provides catalytic financing for businesses in Sierra Leone. This financing will support adoption of solar energy practices and reduce demand on the country’s power grid.

An innovative approach to developing a sustainable seed system in cassava that simultaneously incentivizes all the stakeholders across the value chain is being implemented in Nigeria.

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.

Rwandan women perform the majority of the country’s agricultural labor, and represent 70 percent of those who make their living from agriculture. Yet, the productivity of their work, and their integration within market systems, lags behind that of men.

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.

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.

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.

Under the landmark peace agreement, the Government of Colombia has committed to addressing land issues by formalizing property rights across the country, organizing the national registry, and recovering lands that belong to the state.

Complex flows of capital and credit reach the most remote parts of the continent to pre-finance the extraction and sale of conflict minerals. Few recognize the importance of property rights in these flourishing economies.

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.

This activity was one of four winners of Chemonics’ recent Market Systems and Youth Enterprise Development Innovation Contest.

USAID’s Data Services team is pleased to announce the launch of the Women’s Economic Empowerment and Equality (WE3) Dashboard.