Blog

Among the entrepreneurs supported by USAID's Partnering to Accelerate Entrepreneurship (PACE) Initiative, those businesses that were owned by women grew both revenues and jobs significantly faster.

Market systems that inhibit productivity growth and depress livelihoods are familiar enough across the developing world. Barriers to improvement that turn out to be fundamentally political are two-a-penny.

How can implementers use blended finance to mobilize capital? Chemonics and LixCap share their experiences with sequencing and explore its potential.

Congratulations to the three winners from the Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) competition! These case studies demonstrate the use of CLA in the economic growth sector.

Read about the winners from the Accelerating Women Entrepreneurs Award.

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.

In USAID, we need to worry more about aging populations than we do now. That includes, for those still in their working-age years, how to work longer, healthier, and smarter.

Sat4Farming uses a digital farm development plan to provide cocoa farmers with detailed information on their farms, such as a profit and loss statement, and helps guide their investment decisions.

MEL is not meant to focus just on project performance. Thus, the USAID-funded Feed the Future Mozambique Agricultural Innovations Activity has developed new MEL tools to assess whether business innovations are improving market system inclusiveness for smallholder farmers.

HealthPartners has been helping Ugandans start sustainable health cooperatives since 1997. Three years ago, we shifted from input funding to results-based funding. That shift was a game changer in terms of project cost-effectiveness and cooperative autonomy.

In West Africa, young people are struggling to find viable jobs in their communities. The myAgro program encourages them to become entrepreneurs by employing them to work with farmers and savings groups.

A Mozambique-based wholesaler of agriculture inputs and mechanization equipment received investment support through the Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation program.

How can donors play a role in helping companies adapt to these unpredictable environments? Partnering for Innovation’s pay for performance approach integrates adaptive management into the design of its partnerships agreements.

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.

Cooperatives can provide solutions in many areas of life, such as agriculture, health, finance, transportation, and tourism. To do so, an enabling legal framework must be put in place to allow cooperative businesses to grow and thrive.

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.

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

In 2016, the Global Communities' USAID Cooperative Development Program piloted a project in Nairobi to work with young, urban professionals interested in starting their own cooperative businesses.

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.

Some have found Africa’s participation in world trade to be low. However, a relatively well-developed literature argues that Africa’s trade has been in line with predicted trends and that the continent’s participation in international trade reflects its level of economic activity.

The Feed the Future NAFAKA II: Cereals Market System Development project, funded by USAID and implemented by ACDI/VOCA, developed a strategy to boost agricultural growth in Tanzania’s staple crops by helping individuals form producer organizations.

New results from pilot projects in the Mali and Burkina Faso cotton sectors show how index insurance can accelerate and protect growth for small-scale farmers, promoting long-term resilience both for their families and their local economies.