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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.

How to measure LGBTQIA+ inclusive market systems development

Around the globe, communities are faced with complex challenges and facilitating and sustaining peace remains of critical importance. While peacebuilding programming is implemented throughout the world, little is known about the overall impact and return on investment of these programs. Historically, program evaluations in this field (and in international aid and development broadly) have offered information on outputs, for example the number of people who participated in training, but this information remains insufficient to truly understand the impact.

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

In a three-part blog series, we share lessons on the process of evaluating the Cambodia Feed the Future Harvest II program focused on what systemic changes the program made progress on in the horticulture sector. (Full report here). The lessons are:

In this three-part blog series, we share lessons on the process of evaluating the Cambodia Feed the Future Harvest II program focused on what systemic changes the program made progress on in the horticulture sector. (Full report here). The lessons are:

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.

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.

The United States Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security (2023) envisions a world in which women and girls in all their diversity are equally able to contribute to and benefit from economic growth and development. U.S. Department of State (2023). United States Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/U.S.-Strategy-on-Global-Womens-Economic-Security.pdfThis includes equal access to quality education, better jobs and decent work.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems to search, sort, and analyze data has become increasingly common among governments looking to improve the delivery of financial, health, and education services to their citizens. In the case of the Secretariat of Education of the State of Guanajuato (SEG) in Mexico, a digital approach was particularly urgent as the community continues to grapple with increasing student drop-out rates — over 40,000 students every year.

The blog is authored by John Rachkara, Deputy Chief of Party, Rural Resilience Activity.

CARE’s Farmer Field and Business School (FFBS) model focuses on improving small-scale farmers’ productivity, resilience, and access to markets. FFBS is a hands-on, learning-by-doing approach through which groups of farmers meet regularly during the course of their value chain production cycle to learn about new agricultural techniques and to experiment these treatments on group-managed demonstration plots. Since 2014, FFBS has directly improved the lives of more than 2.5 million farmers and their families.

An important element of effective markets is strong consumer demand that is recognized in the consumer behavior of purchasing and using products. To utilize latent demand and improve demand that produces significant shifts in consumer behavior will require that market activities continuously cater to evolving consumer needs and values. Failure to do so results in missed opportunities to maximize latent demand, activities, and products that fall short of expected goals because of low consumer acceptance.

We live in an age of compound disasters where one emergency is layered on top of the next. This gives way to terrible humanitarian consequences that stop development in its tracks. Forced displacement is at record levels with more than 100 million people displaced around the globe for the first time.

By Mark Wallace, Senior Technical Advisor 

Agriculture and food security, democracy, human rights and governance, economic growth and trade, environment and global climate change, gender, and women’s empowerment. What sectors do you work in? Whatever they may be, in the quest to increase local efforts for a more resilient, prosperous, democratic, and inclusive world, there has never been a better time to focus on cooperatives! What is a Cooperative?

I recently had the opportunity to speak at the 2022 Market Systems Symposium on one of my favorite topics, "Communications as a Change Resouce." Given the global Market Systems Development audience, the conversations delved into how market systems or private sector development programs could better use their communications team and budget to influence change. Programmatic communications tend to think about three distinct audiences of their content - funders, peers, and scalers.

This post was written by Mike Field and Abigail Martuscello, Vikāra Institute.

This post was authored by Mike Field, Vikāra Institute.

For the second installment of the Market Corner blog series, Holly Lard Krueger speaks with sustainable development expert and primary care clinician Liz Willetts about the interconnectedness of our health and environmental systems, the voice missing from global policy decision-making tables, and the true cost of that lack of representation. Access February’s first installment here.

This post was written by Holly Lard Krueger. This month on the Market Corner, I find common ground with two human rights advocates from completely different international development fields by exploring issues of equity and inclusion in supply chains and the application of systems thinking.