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.

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. 

The White House–led Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative brings new energy and a comprehensive approach to our mission at USAID.

Feed the Future conducted a rapid market assessment of its roughly 150 partner agri-businesses and farmers to better understand the impact of the current crisis and the future outlook for the agriculture sector. 

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

In order to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on dairy and beef value chains incorporating food security concerns such as availability, access and utilization, Land O’Lakes Venture37 and Georgian Farmers’ Association conducted a pulse survey in May 2020 of project participants in the USDA Safety and Quality Investment in Livestock project.

This blog post highlights how the RisiAlbania project, which sponsors youth employment and skills training programs in Albania, has invested in and adapted online learning and collaboration to local contexts in the face of COVID-19.

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.

Access to finance is a major pain point in market systems development, but how can we go beyond traditional financing methods to better reach agricultural businesses?

How PNG delivers power to its populace is important to the nation. The Development Strategic Plan calls for carbon neutrality by 2050.

The Lab for Applied Wheat Genomics aims to develop heat-tolerant, high-yielding, and farmer-accepted varieties for South Asia, while simultaneously increasing the research for development capacity of the global wheat improvement system.

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.

In Pakistan, promising small and medium-sized enterprises are turning their innovative ideas into reality — and improving livelihoods — with a boost from a special grant fund.