Blog

FES Vice President Roberta Lauretti-Bernhard participated in the the Specialty Coffee Association EXPO (SCA) in Chicago April 10 -14. FES & Joe Coffee Company  co-hosted a lecture on "Gender Equity in 2024: Women in the Global Coffee Value Chain". The event was developed by Roberta, Amaris Gutierrez-Ray from Joe Coffee and Karen Cebreros, founder of Elan Organic Coffee and co-founder of the Int’l Women in Coffee Alliance (IWCA).

In the second blog in the series, the authors focus on the importance of using a retail distribution market systems lens to gain insights into the business realities of selling construction products and services to low-income customer segments. For example, low-income customers buy in smaller lots and often have important considerations related to decision-making, coping strategies, and trust that require specific business strategies and tactics. The blog examines a few examples from TCIS’s work in relation to how they applied systemic thinking related to retail distribution to improve housing outcomes for incremental builders.

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)

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. 

Like many women, Wamahoro, a native of Rwanda, once worked two jobs, one of which was in the informal sector. “I used to sell my baskets at the local market to supplement my farming income,” she says. At the local market, however, Wamahoro’s handmade baskets sold for only 82 cents a basket — not much in the way of supplemental income.

To slow the unfolding damage of COVID-19 on the tourism industry, public and private-sector representatives came together (virtually, of course) to chart a new path ahead.

USAID is strengthening the fishing sector in El Salvador to help achieve self-reliance in coastal communities, reducing the need to migrate.

The world market for avocados is pretty much divided between Hass and green skin avocados.

USAID's Economic Competitiveness Project is helping to provide technical assistance to micro and small companies in innovation, technology adoption, manufacturing practices, marketing, and more.

USAID/Honduras recently awarded a five-year (2018-2023) activity – Transforming Market Systems (TMS) to foster competitive, resilient, and inclusive market systems that provide increased economic opportunities that incorporate poor, marginalized Hondurans and reduce incentives to migrate.

In Guatemala, USAID’s Creating Economic Opportunities project is working with the private sector and national and local authorities to strengthen economic growth and generate income and employment.

The specialty coffee trend highlights not only the U.S. consumers’ increased preference for higher quality coffee but also an interest in coffee farmers, as achieving higher quality starts with the producer. More than ever, consumers want to know their coffee’s bean-to-cup story.

With support from the Cooperative Development Program (CDP), Equal Exchange set out to answer if small farmers are really too poor to invest. In 2010, the CDP and Equal Exchange began working together with six farmer organizations in Latin America building member investment and savings programs.

Read how a project in the Haitian apparel sector is taking on the challenge of demonstrating development projects' indirect, broader systemic impacts.

Through PISCES, the Program for Investment in the Small Capital Enterprise Sector, operational from 1979 to 1985, USAID and its partner organizations began to discover the principles of success for lending to the poor, opening the way for the microfinance industry.