Blog

This blog was authored by Tess Bayombong, Maria Adelma Montejo, Emily Janoch, Caitlin Shannon, and Tzusuan Peng. Women entrepreneurs who talk about success in their businesses in the Philippines have fascinating contributions to what success means. Cecile Corio describes an arc of resilience and equality: “I think of ways to recover (my business). Don’t lose trust in yourself. I started from nothing; I can prove that I can lead a better life. … My husband and I have a good give-and-take relationship.”

USAID CATALYZE Partners with Private Equity Fund to Ready SMEs for Private Investors Increasingly, global private investors are eyeing the Western Balkans as the potential for diversifying their portfolios. While private equity financing can raise working capital for a company through restructuring ownership and/or management, few small- and medium-sized business owners in the region are aware of, understand, or desire such a private equity model. In fact, many SME owners resist giving up power and ownership to outsiders.

Sri Lanka’s socioeconomic situation continues to worsen with rising costs and increased challenges in imports and exports due to ongoing supply chain disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. The country’s traditional artisans and the handloom industry have been hit hard.

USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance provides life-saving support to vulnerable and hard-to-reach people. the USAID ADVANCE project supports the mandate of Indonesia's National Disaster Management Authority.

This blog is written by Anila Behramaj.

USAID CATALYZE Private Sector Development Activity Provides COVID-19 Relief Grants to Build Resilience and Adaptability in Sri Lanka's Apparel Sector.

This blog was originally published on the USAID Medium. By Dragana Todosijevic, USAID CATALYZE Engines of Growth (EoG)

In early 2022, the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia) started to emerge from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, boasting rising industrial production, exports to the European Union (EU), increases in wages, and credit growth. The region is ripe for investment, but Russia’s war against Ukraine threatens this recovery, through higher energy and food costs, disruption in supply chains, and interruptions in trade.

In the way that cooperatives form when people with common interests come together, apex organizations form when several of those cooperatives organize to achieve common goals. Farming cooperatives have the unique advantage of being engrained in the local context and knowledgeable about their sector. Their value is providing farmers with advantages that make them more profitable than they would be outside of the group. Apex organizations take that farmer support a step further by strengthening the cooperative groups on a larger scale. 

Biljana Stanisavljva started her small business in Serbia in 2011, growing wheat and corn as a smallholder farmer. She wants to grow her business, but like many agricultural entrepreneurs, she finds it very challenging to obtain funds for her expansion plans. And as a woman, she faces additional challenges. Even after a decade as a registered business owner, she still has to rely on her husband for most business decisions. 

In early 2020, the Feed the Future Bangladesh Rice and Diversified Crops Activity, funded by USAID and implemented by ACDI/VOCA, began an assessment to understand how the Activity could increase financial access for agricultural small- and medium-sized enterprises (agri-SMEs) in Bangladesh during COVID-19. The assessment originally focused on opportunities for the Activity to increase financial access through agent banks during the pandemic.

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.

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

Over 67 million youth are unemployed globally and the majority live in rural areas with limited economic opportunities. The fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmingly impacted youth whose employment fell by more than twice that of adults in 2020.

This post was originally published on Helvetas' website and written by Chalachew Gebeyehu, SKY Project Manager, Helvetas; Bettina Jenny, Head of Skills Development & Education, Helvetas; and Sabrina Würmli, Advisor for Skills Development, Helvetas. 

(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)

By Angela Hogg, Regional Environment Office Director, USAID/RDMA

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. 

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.

Banks in Bangladesh are exploring agent banking and digital services as ways of coping with COVID-19 restrictions, expanding financial inclusion to those in need, and preventing the gap in microfinancing from widening further.

Youth — who make up a large portion of the potential workforce in developing countries — are often left out of markets systems, representing a significant lost opportunity to deliver social and economic benefits. 

Frenki Kozeli, Julian Guelig, and Dany Khy share three approaches to forming private sector engagement partnerships that can be replicated and tailored across development contexts.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures national governments around the world are taking to contain it have created new challenges for families who were already vulnerable to a number of climate-related disaster risks. New research supported by USAID is learning whether investments in broadly based resilience helps families to withstand even this completely unexpected and global shock.

Field research from from around the world is finding that resilience to climate-related shocks can encourage rural families to invest more for higher productivity, creating new opportunities for greater prosperity.

In our recent webinar discussing the findings from the Feed the Future Advancing Women’s Empowerment (AWE) landscape analysis and case studies on women and youth inclusion in agricultural market systems, we were joined by RisiAlbania and ELAN RDC, two of the activities featured in the case studies.