Blog

The December 7, 2023 Finance Champions meeting featured four finance-focused presentations on:

Introduction

Society Development Committee, or SDC, based in Faridpur, Bangladesh, is a microfinance partner of the Feed the Future Bangladesh Livestock and Nutrition Activity, funded by USAID and implemented by ACDI/VOCA. Through this partnership, thousands of people working in Bangladesh’s livestock sector have benefited from microfinance products.

Accessible finance is vital for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Yet, oftentimes, they struggle to access financing from traditional sources because they lack the knowledge to produce comprehensive financial documentation required by banks. Meanwhile, financial institutions may perceive small businesses as higher risk clients due to their size, limited track record, and insufficient collateral. In many countries, like Rwanda, financial institutions have limited knowledge in the livestock value chain financing opportunities compared to crops value chain.

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.

In rapid response to the abrupt trade disruptions resulting from Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea—a tactic in its war on Ukraine, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched the Agriculture Resilience Initiative (AGRI)-Ukraine. AGRI-Ukraine is critical to supporting Ukraine’s export and agricultural sector needs, which are expected to remain vulnerable to the Russian Federation’s aggression in the months and years to come.

The Finance Champions group was established in March 2023 with the aim to share innovative approaches being tested by USAID Missions, Bureaus and Independent Offices and to exchange learning on the topic of mobilizing finance in development. This group, which is internal to USAID, meets every six weeks, and has grown from an initial group of 20 to 160 members.

Developed through a partnership between the USAID and Mastercard, Project Kirana focused on helping women micro entrepreneurs gain the tools they need to grow their businesses in India. Project Kirana recognized the complex set of problems encountered by women micro entrepreneurs in India: limited business and digital financial capabilities, and limited access to formal financial services. By equipping women entrepreneurs with the knowledge and tools they needed — including financial and digital literacy expertise, business management skills, and strategies for addressing cultural barriers — over 2,500 women were able to grow their small retail businesses and increase their incomes.

To address the lack of food safety certifications available at the SME level and validate the implementation of project trainings, Feed the Future Business Drivers for Food Safety designed the BD4FS Pre-HACCP Validation Badge program. Working with growing food businesses (GFBs) interested in earning a Validation Badge, BD4FS held specialized trainings, offered technical assistance, and organized a professional food safety audit of 21 Senegalese GFBs.

Lack of access to finance is universally regarded as one of the most significant constraints to economic development. Without affordable and appropriate capital, Northern Kenyan individuals and micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are prevented from participating in the formal economy, capitalizing on business opportunities, investing in their livelihoods, and responding to shocks, such as natural disasters.

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

Safe food supports national economies and global trade, in addition to contributing to food security, nutrition, and sustainable development. Governments can facilitate a culture of food safety by creating clear food safety regulations, policies and an enabling environment where small and medium-sized enterprises can thrive. Ethiopia’s government has been continuously upgrading its food safety laws and regulations to meet the requirements of both international buyers and its fast-growing food retail and wholesale establishments.

In agricultural market systems development (MSD), a crucial debate has emerged—whether to adopt a crop-agnostic or a value chain-specific approach. Day 2 of the 2023 Market Systems Symposium explored this debate with insights from experienced professionals, shedding light on the complexities and considerations within this strategic decision-making process.

This blogpost is one in a series of blogs sharing insights gained from the Market Systems Symposium 2023. The MSS blogpost provides a brief snapshot of key insights shared across a number of different sessions in MSS 2023 held in Cape Town between 13-15 November 2023.

The blog provides an excellent case of how smallholders can be integrated into a high-value supply chain when the contexts are effectively considered. The example shows how context specific efforts the generate value will take off, and can emerge as an attractor that encourages ongoing change with knock-on effects. It is also important to recognize that there are concerns related to only working with a single firm.

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.

Climate change has been a slow-moving risk for some time now, but what is often missed, which this blog points out, is that there are immediate consequences affecting most people around the world, especially the most vulnerable. As the blog highlights, increasing weather variability is a challenge for most smallholder farmers, including in Uganda. At the same time, the ability to effectively forecast weather has remained low, which creates a circumstance of increasing risks since erratic weather patterns mean farmers are often caught off guard damaging crops and reducing productivity.

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

Have you ever wanted to see where USAID provides funding, or what USAID invests in?

This post was written by Habitat for Humanity's Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter and was Originally Published on the Vikāra Institute's website.

Does economic growth improve food security? The short answer is no. Although mainstream economics suggests that sustainable economic growth is essential for ensuring global food security, empirical evidence is mixed, at best. Over the past decade, the world saw notable economic growth with decreasing global economic inequality between countries, yet food insecurity continued to rise.

This post was written by Habitat for Humanity's Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter and was originally published on the Vikāra Institute's website.