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Food Enterprise Solutions recognizes that food safety is everyone’s business. And – that food safety is good for business!  Today, June 7, 2022, we are celebrating Food Safety Day 2022 to highlight the exciting work that the Feed the Future Business Drivers for Safety (BD4FS) project is doing with growing food businesses in Senegal to promote safer food handling and ultimately more successful businesses.

In international development, we often talk about how the private sector is a key ingredient to unlocking a resilient market system. The private sector can: provide an outlet for aggregated product; serve as a technical resource to build capacity and improve quality; offer access to financial capital; and drive sustainable relationships at origin. So, what happens when the private sector also becomes a direct implementer of one of USAID’s projects on the ground?

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

This post is written by Jane Lowicki-Zucca, Senior Youth Advisor, Bureau for Resilience and Food Security, USAID. Welcome to Youth Employment Month featured jointly this September by Agrilinks and Marketlinks! 

By Clare Clingain and Emily Sloane, International Rescue Committee (IRC) If you want to understand something, you probably need to measure it – and measure it well. Chances are, someone has already tried to measure what you want to examine, but if that’s not the case, it’s important to design a tool that’s fit for the intended purpose and to test it out in multiple contexts.

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.

As part of its work in Uganda, the USAID/Uganda Feed the Future Market System Monitoring (MSM) Activity applied a systems approach to understanding the Karamoja region, the focus of humanitarian and resilience programming in Uganda.

Youth promoters worked with Bell Industries to help the company sell PICS bags, an innovative grain storage solution that prevents post-harvest loss, to smallholder farmers in Kenya.

In the Feed the Future Senegal Youth in Agriculture program, 4-H clubs help youth build life skills, relationships and hands-on learning that will prepare them for future employment opportunities.

Have you ever thought about your career as a lifelong project? That’s how over 2,000 young people in western Burkina Faso define their professional journey.

This post is authored by Joseph Spanjers and Camille Parker from the Economics Team in the Center for Economics and Market Development and is part of a series of blogs focused on Youth Employment throughout September on

Author: Digital Frontiers Staff, DAI

Given that agriculture is the largest employer globally with over a billion workers, green jobs provide an avenue for agri-food systems employment that helps address food security and climate change.

Africa is beaming with the radiance of its youth; however, their future doesn’t seem so bright.

How can young people prepare for a future that few of us can define today?

In collaboration with USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, Marketlinks is exploring private sector engagement in fragile and conflict-affected settings during October.

This post was originally published on the SCOPEinsight website.

Pension funds and other institutional investors hold more than $100 trillion in assets, and their stakeholders are increasingly interested in utilizing those funds to make socially responsible investments. At the same time, countries in Africa are growing fast — but risk falling behind if they can’t finance the necessary infrastructure to support their growth. On the surface, it would seem like a perfect union of returns and social responsibility. Yet only a fraction of institutional investors hold assets in developing countries. What is holding them back?

This post was written by Dan Hudner, Market System Resilience Measurement Lead at Mercy Corps.

A new blog series explores the opportunities and challenges market systems development practitioners face working side-by-side with humanitarian actors in fragile and conflict-affected situations.

This post is the second installment in Marketlinks' new blog series, The Market Corner, which explores market systems development (MSD) implementation in fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCAS) during the month of October.

Across engagement efforts in the field, we’ve seen firsthand how some private sector actors can mitigate drivers of instability and conflict by creating jobs, providing essential goods, increasing financial inclusion, developing infrastructure, advocating for peace and economic stability, and promoting other forms of inclusive economic development.

The private sector is a powerful force in driving economic growth, creating jobs, and boosting opportunities that improve the lives of people and communities worldwide. USAID has partnered with companies and investors to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges since its founding in 1960. 

By Erin Magee, Regional Advisor, Latin America & the Caribbean, USAID/Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance For Diana Arismendy Schroeder, establishing a community-centered approach is critical when working in fragile and conflict-affected settings.

This post is authored by Susan Rae Ross, Sr. Private Sector Engagement Advisor, Office of Maternal/Child Health and Nutrition, USAID Global Health Bureau; Dr. Gaurav Sharma, Sr. Maternal, Newborn, Child Health Technical Advisor and Dr. Christopher Morgan, Sr Immunization Technical Advisor for the MOMENTUM Private Healthcare Delivery Project.