Blog

When Hurricane Dorian struck The Bahamas in 2019, USAID led and coordinated the U.S. Government’s disaster response efforts, deploying an elite disaster team and providing nearly $34 million in humanitarian assistance.

As COVID-19 circumvented the globe impacting every nation, sector, business, and family, it brought numerous challenges in its wake.  In developing countries – where market systems are often fragmented, connections between market actors weak, and businesses’ reserves limited – perishable products like vegetables were particularly hard hit. Both the supply and demand were affected by the shock. As the crisis deepened, some market actors lost considerable revenue and some went out of business.

The Heifer International program in Nepal provided women with goats and training to facilitate sustainable escapes from poverty.

Since the market for “bottom of the pyramid” consumers was identified nearly 20 years ago, product marketing, sales, and distribution have evolved with the help of technology. Here's how two businesses use mobile and cloud-based tools to reach emerging market customers.

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.

Growing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is an important goal of much donor assistance. However, development practitioners do not always articulate theoretical frameworks linking interventions to outcomes of sales or employment growth.

SNV's "Enhancing Opportunities for Women Enterprises" (FLOW/EOWE) programme focuses on supporting rural women in entrepreneurship by addressing the systemic barriers that many rural women face when launching their businesses.

The USAID Center for Resilience commissioned the Overseas Development Institute, in conjunction with the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN), to conduct research into resilience and poverty escapes in Nepal and other Feed the Future focus countries.

Economic development programs are increasingly shifting to a system change approach instead of direct delivery service.

Network analysis is often cited as a useful tool for analyzing market systems, but can be difficult for large networks. In Bangladesh, the USAID-funded Rice and Diversified Crops (RDC) activity tested an ego-net approach.

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.

Learn how driving firms to to consider smallholder farmers as a more integral part of their business strategy results in a more inclusive input supply system.

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

The LEO project is speeding towards the finish line! LEO’s broad goals of increasing the capacity of donors and implementers to design, implement and evaluate market systems projects have led to some landmark publications.

Underdevelopment and missed market opportunities come with real costs, especially for women.

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

Our next two vignettes on the trail to mobilizing private capital have arrived! Mull over these as we hunker down for the night.

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.

Here is our first WLSME story from Kyrgyzstan: Gulmira Asanbaeva explains her project's work delivering nonfinancial services to grow women's small businesses.

Did you miss the March 24th Microlinks seminar on markets systems development and resilience? Catch up on the highlights by reading this post and then add your comments or questions!

Researchers from Duke's Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness presented three case studies on public-private partnerships.

In this post, Whitney Dubinsky of USAID comments on the indisputable need for data on women's economic empowerment.

Assessing the Impact of Microfinance Services (AIMS) addressed both sides of the client assessment coin: how to improve impact and how to use client data to improve operations.

ACDI/VOCA, with its partner organization Bai Tushum Fund (BT Fund), will work to reduce barriers to human capital, social capital and business information that limit the growth of women-owned SMEs in the Kyrgyz Republic.