Blog

Ryan Elenbaum of Business and Finance Consulting shared his takeaways from the 14th MFC Annual Conference.

Aldona Rutkowska of MFC discusses MFC's work in Europe and describes the JASMINE (Joint Action to Support Microfinance Institutions in Europe) program.

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.

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.

Strategic local planning and investment to facilitate housing, personal, and professional risk-taking, new market opportunities, and an entirely new vision of how housing could be delivered using the momentum of private initiative.

Congratulations to the three winners from the Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) competition! These case studies demonstrate the use of CLA in the economic growth sector.

How can implementers use blended finance to mobilize capital? Chemonics and LixCap share their experiences with sequencing and explore its potential.

In Moldova, the “golden triangle” of collaboration among industry, government, and academia is transforming the technology sector. Here’s the recipe for success from the Moldova Competitiveness Project.

The USAID Agro Horizon project helped young entrepreneurs set up a dried fruit processing facility to produce trail mix, which allowed them to enter new supermarket chains and develop business skills.

This activity was one of four winners of Chemonics’ recent Market Systems and Youth Enterprise Development Innovation Contest.

Tajikistan is on the cusp of achieving its vision of a fully-functional market that allows land-use rights to be bought and sold.

Helen Bradbury calls for a gender data revolution to help counteract indifference.

Well, we're about to make camp and need some good campfire tales. Read on for two more vignettes.

Time for two more vignettes! See how Cardno promoted access to finance through financial consulting assistance and how USAID partnered to create the American Bank of Kosovo.

The Government of Serbia is growing the MSME sector through public, private, education and civil society actors. USAID/Serbia asked the LEO activity to utilize organizational network analysis (ONA) to explore these networks' effectiveness.

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. 

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. 

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

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. 

(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. 

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.

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

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.

This blog is written by Anila Behramaj.