Blog

As Marketlinks examines Pay-for-Results this August, check out this blog from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) highlighting compact designed to reduce poverty through economic growth in Cabo-Verde.

This post shares an overview of the Digital Credit and Women's Economic Empowerment Convening 2019 and introduces a resource by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) that explores four steps in conducting impact evaluations for measuring women's empowerment.

In August, Marketlinks is focusing on the Pay-for-Results model in global development. This post from the World Bank blog highlights an upcoming project to incentivize dairy suppliers in Tanzania to deliver input bundles for smallholder dairy farmers.

“Pay-for-results” is trending! There is a swelling chorus in the development community about the potential of pay-for-results (PforR) to increase accountability, foster innovation, and stretch scarce development dollars. With the growing need to “do more with less” and demonstrate results when using development dollars, PforR is a compelling solution — one which USAID and other donors will inevitably want to see more of.

Data protection is a primary focus of the humanitarian sector. In late 2016, USAID supported a digital cash transfer preparedness grant meant to help NGOs be equally well-prepared to offer (digital) cash as to offer other modalities of assistance (e.g. in-kind items).

The Government of Morocco is addressing the challenge of providing youth with skills to enter complex, highly competitive global industries. Morocco's Employability and Land Compact introduces a scalable model for secondary education to improve graduates' employability.

This post highlights critical questions about youth entrepreneurs and how to build an inclusive system that supports them through both financial and non-financial means.

This post spotlights an interview with Lala Faiz and Cameron Khosrowshahi from the USAID INVEST team on mobilizing private capital.

This post offers recommendations on managing the shifts in culture, management and partnering needed when a project shifts from providing direct services to a facilitative market systems approach.

This month, Marketlinks is highlighting the topic of Youth Employment.

This is the third blog in the Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation building private sector resilience blog series.

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.

As USAID programs evolve to adopt a market systems approach, implementing partners must adapt their monitoring and evaluation approaches to better capture dynamics of complex systems change.

This is the second blog the Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation series on building private sector resilience. Stay tuned for the next blog in the private series, as we look at an example of how a more resilient company can provide critical technologies and value-added services after a natural disaster.

This post introduces a paper from the Market Development Facility that explores the effect of increased household income on women's economic empowerment in the context of household dynamics, and seeks to understand how access to economic inputs, information, opportunities or services impacts agency.

This is the second blog post on what Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) can learn from market systems.

This post shares a blog from the Learning Lab about how the practice of market segmentation could benefit DRG programming.

Learning from an initiative to help private maternity homes in Ghana survive the departure of the primary midwife-owner.

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.

USAID is accepting submissions to the annual Collaborating, Learning and Adapting (CLA) Case Competition until Friday, April 12.

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.

This week, Chief Economist Dr. Louise Fox, and Susan Wilder, Policy Advisor on finance and private sector development, celebrate the launch of the Agency’s new Private Sector Engagement Policy with a blog on why economic analysis is critical for effective implementation.

Policymakers throughout the world are emphasizing farmer cooperatives as a strategy to include smallholders in agricultural value chains and to enhance their incomes.

Read about the winners from the Accelerating Women Entrepreneurs Award.

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.