Blog

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.

USAID CATALYZE Private Sector Development Activity Provides COVID-19 Relief Grants to Build Resilience and Adaptability in Sri Lanka's Apparel Sector.

Third in a series of five blogs on the factors that contribute to sustaining and scaling private sector partnerships from the Enduring Results Study 3.0

(Second in a series of five blogs about the drivers of sustainability in USAID partnerships with the private sector based on the Enduring Results Study 3.0)

By Angela Hogg, Regional Environment Office Director, USAID/RDMA

Worldwide, the private sector is playing an unprecedented role in shaping opportunities that improve the lives in the countries and communities that USAID supports. For six decades, USAID has partnered with the private sector to solve the world’s most complex development challenges and to help countries accelerate development progress. 

Banks in Bangladesh are exploring agent banking and digital services as ways of coping with COVID-19 restrictions, expanding financial inclusion to those in need, and preventing the gap in microfinancing from widening further.

The White House–led Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative brings new energy and a comprehensive approach to our mission at USAID.

Access to finance is a major pain point in market systems development, but how can we go beyond traditional financing methods to better reach agricultural businesses?

How PNG delivers power to its populace is important to the nation. The Development Strategic Plan calls for carbon neutrality by 2050.

The Lab for Applied Wheat Genomics aims to develop heat-tolerant, high-yielding, and farmer-accepted varieties for South Asia, while simultaneously increasing the research for development capacity of the global wheat improvement system.

Nine projects are funded by NWO-WOTRO to strengthen the Netherlands-CGIAR research partnership on generating insights that contribute to improving seed systems in focus regions within Asia and Sub-Sahara Africa.

In Pakistan, promising small and medium-sized enterprises are turning their innovative ideas into reality — and improving livelihoods — with a boost from a special grant fund.

Feed the Future Cambodia Harvest II is a five-year project, now at its halfway point, working to help Cambodia accelerate horticulture sector growth and strengthen the horticulture market system. This case study describes Harvest II’s blended buyer-led and market systems development approach, citing examples of progress to date and posing several learning questions about the project moving forward.

USAID’s Value Chains for Rural Development project uses an inclusive, market systems approach to support smallholder producers, farmer groups, agribusinesses, and community organizations.

This post examines difficulties in measuring inequalities and differences in women's participation in the labor market as well as ways forward in the field.

In the context of Bangladesh, two of the most influential informal norms are family loyalty and social hierarchy, and these norms permeate many layers of social interaction and structure, including market systems and businesses.

Explore how reframing market systems as enabling environments with pockets of momentum, rather than a series of snapshot problems, can boost market systems change efforts.

Learn how the PAGE program is empowering adolescent girls and building their job skills in schools in low-income communities in New Delhi, India.

Learn how a direct sales model solves a market need in Bangladesh.

Reporting back from USAID’s recent Resilience Workshop, ODI’s Dr. Anna Mdee reflects on sustainable poverty escapes, the evidence around them, and the relevance of the resilience agenda and systems thinking to this concept.

Two more vignettes are here, hot off the presses! Read on to find out how two more projects mobilized private capital successfully.

What does "universal financial access" mean? USAID's Casey Dlott calls attention to the digital gender divide.

Read the next WLSME story out of India: Devaprakash Ramakrishnan talks about his project's approach to building women's networks in order to grow small businesses.

"Financial exclusion is the common denominator of development challenges," explains USAID's Fernando Maldonado.