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OECD Development Matters explains how the Blended Finance Principles provide best practices to push private capital into SDG-aligned projects, programs, and markets.

Blended finance has demonstrated the ability to mobilize additional financing for gender-focused projects and companies that advantage women and narrow the gender gap, with a quarter of all blended transactions demonstrating alignment with SDG 5 (Gender Equality) to date.

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?

Blended finance is the strategic use of development funds, such as those from government aid and philanthropic sources, to mobilize private capital for social and environment results, such as improving infrastructure, education, agriculture, healthcare, and more.

Sunday, March 8, 2020, is International Women’s Day. Here are some previous blog posts from Marketlinks that detail the advancement of gender equality worldwide.

This post highlights how officials are stimulating economic reform in Jordan by improving the legal rights of borrowers and lenders, implementing digital financial services and access to credit.

The case of Lebanon mirrors what in the MERS handbook is referred to as a crisis stuck in the relief phase. In crisis environments, short term goals focus on stabilizing households and providing basic needs.

This post is part one in a two-part series about market systems resilience (MSR) and highlights new guidance and tools that provide a foundational understanding of how different programs are approaching the topic.

USAID’s Urban Team is pleased to announce the launch of the new and improved UrbanLinks website.

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

Given the primacy of seed for agricultural sector resilience and growth, development actors are eager to address seed needs in the wake of conflict. This post explores how to tailor those investments for fragile contexts in a way consistent with long-term seed market development.

The Feed the Future team aims to foster the breeding of high-yielding, climate-resilient chickpea within the context of user-preferred traits. Their upstream activities are predicated on the need to facilitate downstream phenotyping and breeding activities.

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.

The vast majority of food grown in Africa is by smallholder farmers. Implementing these four recommendations will speed up the process of putting improved seed in the hands of Africa’s food growers permanently.

A constraint to raising agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa is the lack of commercial availability of high-quality seed of improved modern crop varieties. Stakeholders have made a great effort to develop regional variety catalogs to increase the supply of high-quality seed.

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.

CIAT supports the development of seed systems uniting actors along the value chain to create sustainable seed systems and spur links with formal seed producers.

Feed the Future, a USAID program that invests in private-sector partnerships to commercialize agricultural innovations in smallholder markets, conducted a study in 2016 that distilled lessons learned on commercializing seed in smallholder markets in sub-Saharan Africa

Nearly 75% of the Guatemalan population is employed through small- and medium enterprises, yet local laws restrict credit unions' abilities to provide loans to SMEs.

This month, Marketlinks is focused on seed-related enabling environment and market systems. Share your submissions to be included in our round-up.

It is essential that markets actively engage people, regardless of gender, to increase the likelihood of generating value-added solutions for society. In this context, gender inequities are not secondary but are of primary concern.

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.

The AVANSE Program—the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Feed the Future program in Northern Haiti (2013–2019)—shows the value of integrating political economy analysis (PEA) in agricultural programming.

USAID/Mozambique engaged in programming, assessing, and leading critical climate change technical assistance activities that support low-emission development strategies (LEDS), building climate change resilience, and strengthening local capacity.