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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:

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.

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.

In early June, I had the opportunity to see how the United States has used trade to advance gender equality while on an interagency delegation with senior officials from the Department of State, Department of Labor, and U.S. Trade Representative’s Office (USTR).

With more than half of Hondurans younger than 25 and the majority of the population living below the poverty line, young people need access to employment opportunities. Yet, too many Honduran young women and men face dismal economic prospects with 27 percent of youth not in education, employment or training. Compounded by the impacts of climate change and food insecurity, those who cannot find jobs are at risk of falling further into poverty or migrating elsewhere in search of opportunities.

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 is co-authored by Komal Bazaz Smith, Program Director of USAID Digital Connectivity & Cybersecurity Partnership Programs and Anthony Brown, Co-Founder, Acute Incite

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.

Necessity Breeds Entrepreneurship  “I needed to provide for my children.” It’s a simple reason that motivates millions of parents to earn money every day.

This blog was written by Carolyn Barker-Villena, Corus International's Senior Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean.

On August 4, 2022, the USAID Private Sector Engagement (PSE) Hub held "Platform Work and Financial Inclusion: How Can the Development Community Extend Finance for Gig Workers?"