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This post was originally posted on the SCOPEinsight website.

In emerging markets, entrepreneurs of growth-stage companies often struggle to access financing. Debt is hard to come by and securing equity often requires giving up significant company ownership in return.

Throughout December, Marketlinks has shared the top market-led development content from 2021, including the most-read blogs and the most

Reflections from Katie Garcia, Deputy Director of USAID’s Private Sector Engagement Hub, and Kristin O’Planick, Market Systems Team Lead in USAID’s Bureau for Resilience and Food Security. There is a growing amount of convergence between PSE and MSD. For practitioners of either approach, there is value in learning more about the tools and techniques of the other to see how they can be useful in advancing the shared goal of transformational change.

Earlier this month, I spoke with market systems development (MSD) expert Mike Klassen and two MSD leaders, Nina FitzSimons CEO of PRISMA, a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade-funded program in Indonesia, and Bidowra Khan, Team Lead for Social Inclusion and Support Market Systems for the USAID Feed the Future Rice and Diversified Crops Activity in B

This post was authored by Kati Suominen, Founder and CEO, Nextrade Group and Technical Director, eTrade Alliance. This January, the Alliance for eTrade Development (“eTrade Alliance”) will be taking over Marketlinks, sharing experiences from its two years of implementation and making the case for why enabling ecommerce should be at the forefront of the development agenda.

As connectivity grows, digital technologies are transforming the Indo-Pacific region. The Southeast Asia region grew from 360 million internet users in 2019 to 400 million in 2020.

This post is the second in Marketlinks' ecommerce series and is authored by Kati Suominen, Founder and CEO, Nextrade Group and Technical Director, eTrade Alliance. Read the first post here.

“All technology has potential when modeled in the vacuum of our whiteboards and proposals,” remarks Revi Sterling, Director of the USAID WomenConnect Challenge (WCC). Shrewdly cutting to the chase, Sterling adds: “[But] rural smallholder farmer women do not live in vacuums.” In other words: for digital technologies to be part of any development solution, practitioners must first address the myriad of real-life barriers and inequities surrounding technology use.

This month, the Market Corner takes a look at one e-business leader's experience applying a systems approach to grow her businesses. What can more than a decade of experience implementing market systems development (MSD) programs in Nigeria and Bangladesh teach a rising e-business entrepreneur?   Talking the talk and walking the walk.

This post is the third in Marketlinks' ecommerce series and is authored by Kati Suominen, Founder and CEO, Nextrade Group and Technical Director, eTrade Alliance. Access the first and second posts.

This blog is part of the WomenConnect Challenge Blog Series: Introducing Strategies for Closing the Gender Digital Divide. USAID’s WomenConnect Challenge (WCC) is a global call for solutions to improve women’s participation in everyday life by meaningfully changing the ways women access and use technology. In the first round of the Challenge, WCC awarded nine grants to organizations working to identify and change the social and economic circumstances that keep women offline and under-empowered.

This post is the forth in Marketlinks' ecommerce series and is authored by Kati Suominen, Founder and CEO, Nextrade Group and Technical Director, eTrade Alliance. Access the first, second, and third posts.

By Kati Suominen, Founder and CEO, Nextrade Group and Techical Director, eTrade Alliance Ecommerce – the sale and purchase of goods and services online – is booming in developing countries and their export markets, opening new opportunities for developing country micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) to grow their sales, export, diversify their markets, and create new jobs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: M. Daniel Vazquez is a Senior Standards Specialist at the Center for Economics and Market Development in the Bureau for Development, Democracy and Innovation at USAID.

Authored by Jenn Williamson, Vice President of Gender and Social Inclusion at ACDI/VOCA The negative effects of LGBTQ+ discrimination and exclusion are many. Stigma, lost earning potential, harassment, violence, and homelessness have more than just negative psychological and social impacts; they also take an economic toll on individuals, households, and countries. 

In March 2020, the Government of Uganda introduced a series of preventative measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the country. These measures, including the closure of businesses and restriction of movement, were anticipated to have an impact on the economy and on agricultural production. USAID/Uganda was interested in understanding the impact of COVID-19 and these government measures on the agricultural market system, to anticipate how resilient the system would be and to identify opportunities to adapt existing programming or introduce new emergency measures.

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.

About the Author: Paul Fekete is a Senior International Trade Advisor at the Center for Economics and Market Development in the Bureau for Development, Democracy and Innovation at USAID.

About the author: Eleanor Thornton is a Senior International Trade Specialist at the Center for Economics and Market Development in the Bureau for Development, Democracy and Innovation at USAID.

Jane Wangige is a rice farmer in Kirinyaga County who has made money and improved her family’s livelihood from her rice farm. Her business prospered due to her membership in Mwea Rice Growers Multipurpose Co-operative Society (MRGM). MRGM is a farmer’s cooperative society that has accessed financing from USAID’s Kenya Investment Mechanism (KIM)—or specifically, a KIM partner financial institution, Co-operative Bank of Kenya.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephen Leonelli is the Inclusive Development Hub’s LGBTQI+ Program Analyst. Mirna Garcia, summer intern for the LGBTQI+ portfolio, contributed to this article.

Over the past few decades, we’ve all heard variations of the same refrain: the future is digital. However, digital’s promise is hard to realize in many contexts given the technology infrastructure required for success. This goes beyond broadband internet availability and access to include cultural norms and other factors that affect individual access and use, particularly for vulnerable populations.

This post was originally published on Agrilinks. The Feed the Future Advancing Women’s Empowerment (AWE) Program’s Julia Hakspiel, with Friederike Strub, spoke with Wade Channell, senior economic growth advisor for gender with USAID about how we can leverage the enabling environment to achieve scale in women’s empowerment.