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This month, the Market Corner sits down with two impact investing experts, Sana Kapadia from GenderSmart Investing and Rory Moses, an independent consultant most recently with the G7 Impact Taskforce and previously Associate Director at Palladium Impact Capital. In this month’s first installment of the series, the Market Corner examines where the impact investing field is headed, and the role that systems thinking can play in accelerating that journey.

By Priya Sharma, Jonathan Ng, and Lawrence Camp

Finance is currently front and center in the development community - and it should be.  Finance is an indispensable driver of economic growth, the source of human prosperity, and essential to accomplishing USAID’s development objectives. 

This is the second installment in May’s Market Corner series, written by Holly Lard Krueger, which focuses on the market systems development (MSD) tools and resources being shared at the 2022 Market Systems Symposium and ways for practitioners to engage with the MSD community both at and outside of the annual event.

This is the third post in a four-part series exploring impact investment and finance for development authored by Autumn Gorman of USAID's Private Sector Engagement Hub.

Since 1986, Equal Exchange has been partnering with cooperatives around the world through inclusive supply chains, offering better trade conditions and improved pricing all while building long-term relationships. It is through these relationships that the opportunity arose to dig deeper into the challenges these communities face to facilitate solutions that are designed and led by cooperatives in each unique context through the Cooperative Development Program, funded by USAID. 

This is the fourth post in a four-part series exploring impact investment and finance for development authored by Autumn Gorman of USAID's Private Sector Engagement Hub.

Pact’s longstanding livelihoods model, WORTH, is a critical tool for building financial access and incomes around the world. Since its inception in Nepal in 1998, WORTH has reached 1.14 million individuals, primarily women and girls, through 48,342 groups across 16 countries. To recognize and learn from this milestone, we recently conducted a formal review of 28 WORTH programs, 17 of which were funded by USAID.

I recently had the opportunity to speak at the 2022 Market Systems Symposium on one of my favorite topics, "Communications as a Change Resouce." Given the global Market Systems Development audience, the conversations delved into how market systems or private sector development programs could better use their communications team and budget to influence change. Programmatic communications tend to think about three distinct audiences of their content - funders, peers, and scalers.

The COVID-19 pandemic set women back in labor force participation for (now) well-known reasons: women typically shoulder more care burdens and disproportionately work in less remote-compatible occupations.

The story doesn’t end when the lights come on for the first time in rural communities – electric service is a powerful foundation for strengthening communities. It’s critical to also provide enough knowledge to help them generate more income, improve healthcare services, and access better education. With electricity, farmers can mechanize their mills, coffee growers can process their own harvest, and dairy farmers can chill their milk.

This post was written by USAID Private Sector Engagement and was originally published on Exposure.

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. 

This article first appeared in NCBA CLUSA’s Co-op Weekly Newsletter and has been updated for MarketLinks.

This article first appeared in NCBA CLUSA’s Co-op Weekly Newsletter and has been updated for MarketLinks.

Agriculture and food security, democracy, human rights and governance, economic growth and trade, environment and global climate change, gender, and women’s empowerment. What sectors do you work in? Whatever they may be, in the quest to increase local efforts for a more resilient, prosperous, democratic, and inclusive world, there has never been a better time to focus on cooperatives! What is a Cooperative?

In Kenya, the law governing cooperative businesses predates the 2010 Constitution. As a newly decentralized nation with 47 ‘distinct but interdependent’ counties, the 1997 national cooperative law needs to change to reflect the new government structure. What is harder to agree on is how. It is important to get it right because cooperatives are key contributors to Kenya’s economy.

By Abigail Martuscello, Vikāra Institute

As private foundations and investors take more interest in refugee services, we are seeing more innovative solutions and approaches for delivering services to refugee communities. The Smart Communities Coalition (SCC) brings the humanitarian and private sectors together to foster innovation in refugee settings, and at the SCC’s 5th Annual Meeting, one theme resonated: there is a strong economic case for refugees, who present a large untapped market as productive members of their host communities and would benefit from tailored services, not just humanitarian aid. 

On May 12, 2022, the USAID Private Sector Engagement (PSE) Hub held a webinar in its Mobilizing Finance For Development series: Realizing the Potential of Development Impact Bonds: Is the Verdict Still Out?

Localization is the recognition that local stakeholders know better what their challenges are and how to solve them than do traditional development practitioners. It necessarily positions local stakeholders as solution-makers and implementors while positioning development practitioners as facilitators, trainers, and networkers. 

This post was originally published on Medium.

This post was written by USAID Private Sector Engagement and was originally published on Exposure.

This post was originally published on Medium. Toyota is a bustling town situated on one of Liberia’s main roadways that caters to commercial truckers and typical vehicle passengers who pass through en route to Liberia’s major cities or neighboring Cote d’Ivoire. Its location makes Totota an ideal trading hub.

By Alexander Riabov, Communications Specialist, DAI-Digital Frontiers