Events

Forging successful partnerships with the private sector often involves overcoming practical barriers like institutional competition, overlapping agendas, distributional disputes, and organizational legacies that hinder innovation. 

Smaller enterprises in the agriculture sector have long struggled to access adequate and timely capital for their business activities, despite their critical role in moving food from farm to fork. The development finance sector has increasingly focused on such enterprises, launching various funds and initiatives to bridge the estimated US$ 74.5 billion annual financing gap they face across Sub-Saharan Africa.

USAID CATALYZE, a Private Sector Engagement (PSE) Hub project, is innovating new ways to engage with the private sector by speeding up the grant procurement process to mobilize capital towards underserved sectors, geographies, and populations globally.

In the developing world, banks and private sector investment funds are two of the largest sources of capital for agricultural small and midsize enterprises (agri-SMEs). Banks are by far the farthest reaching, serving a large portion of the market through their branch networks. While having the potential to transform both local economies and food systems through agricultural financing, they often take too conservative of an approach to lending, have demanding collateral requirements, and tend to be focused on short loan tenors.

Ecommerce is opening new opportunities for developing country micro, small, and mid-size enterprises (MSMEs) to engage in trade, grow, and create new jobs. The Alliance for eTrade Development II Activity (eTrade Alliance) is a Global Development Alliance (GDA) implemented in 2019-26 between USAID and 13 leading private sector partners, and supported by implementing partners Palladium and Nextrade Group, aimed to advance developing country MSMEs' use of ecommerce, including for cross-border trade.

Launched in 2014, the World Bank’s Trade Facilitation Support Program (TFSP) assists developing countries to align their trade practices with the World Trade Organization Trade Facilitation Agreement (WTO TFA).

Many small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the Western Balkans lack adequate information on how to access affordable finance, expand their businesses, and improve their supply chains. This is particularly true for women-owned SMEs (W-SMEs). To unlock private capital for SMEs and W-SMEs in the region, USAID CATALYZE initiated the Engines of Growth Activity (EoG).

Sustainable market systems development is rooted in its ability to achieve broad-based, inclusive economic growth. However, many markets are deeply inequitable and exclude women, older people, youth, persons with disabilities, and other marginalized groups. Humanitarian and development practitioners can help fulfill the promise that markets hold for improving livelihoods by supporting disenfranchised groups’ access to markets as a key pathway for economic empowerment.

In 2019, USAID conducted a review of rigorous, causal evidence organized around common theories of change for growing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Since then, additional studies on these outcomes have emerged, adding to existing evidence on different modalities of consulting, and beginning to fill important gaps in equity finance and women-led SMEs.

As crises become more global and frequent in nature and economies more interdependent, the need to elevate the ways that market systems adapt to and proactively prepare for shocks and stresses is becoming more important than ever.

Strikingly, only around one-third of countries worldwide prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace to some extent; even fewer do so on the basis of gender identity.  In short, too many LGBTQI+ persons lack explicit, unequivocal employment protections when they encounter discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics globally.

Investors and businesses need clear, transparent, enforceable, and efficient rules to operate effectively in the marketplace. Research shows that entrepreneurship, new firm entry, existing business growth, and overall investment thrive most in stable and predictable environments, where there is trust among actors. A strong business environment often also translates into more jobs in the market.

On Thursday, June 30, a panel of local cooperative leaders and USAID staff from Haiti, Paraguay, and the Philippines discussed the relevance of cooperatives and their role in advancing USAID’s localization policy.

This webinar explored the care economy – a priority gap highlighted in the U.S. government’s first-ever National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality.

As seen throughout the current pandemic, the health needs of a population cannot be met without timely access to quality-assured health products. COVID-19 has renewed global attention around the importance of diversifying a country’s supplier base, thereby opening up an immediate opportunity to strengthen and focus efforts around local and regional manufacturing of health products.

Marketlinks and the Alliance for eTrade Development II (“eTrade Alliance”) held a webinar on Wednesday, January 26 at 9:00am EST exploring how ecommerce has emerged as a crucial tool for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) growth, and the roles that donors and private sector partners can play in ushering an equitable and inclusive digital transformation for SMEs in developing markets.

Marketlinks, USAID/India, USAID MOMENTUM Private Healthcare Delivery, and private sector partners held a webinar on Tuesday, November 30 sharing practical examples of leveraging the private sector for greater immunization program reach.

Balancing the challenges and needs of private sector actors operating in fragile and conflict-affected environments with the humanitarian mandate is an area of creative tension and opportunity for developing context-sensitive, market-based approaches that are the cornerstone of lasting recovery and resilience for conflict-affected people. For development practitioners, effectively and sensitively navigating both those spaces and leveraging the synergies therein is key to developing mutually beneficial partnerships to achieve lasting, market-based development outcomes.

Panelists working on youth employment issues in international development shared their perspectives on how to balance out supply- and demand-side approaches to deliver better outcomes.

This session shared experiences from financial services providers in three different markets that are supporting government to person (G2P) payment programs in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The past 60 years have seen tremendous gains in global health, however there is still work to be done to achieve the targets set under the health and well-being Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). Against this backdrop, are the emerging trends in development finance which have resulted in significant funding gaps. Since reaching an all time high in 2013, development assistance for health has remained stagnant.

Join us for the third webinar in the Principled Interest series to learn tactics from the investment world on building resilient and inclusive markets. 

This webinar is part of a series we are calling "Principled Interest," a monthly webinar that will bring together diverse perspectives to discuss a range of development finance topics.

This Marketlinks webinar looked at the integration of psychosocial support interventions with traditional economic recovery programming. Speakers from Action for Hunger, International Rescue Committee, and Catholic Relief Services shared successful examples from their programming in Iraq, South Sudan, and El Salvador and Honduras.

Countries around the world are in the midst of rapid development and adopting digital technologies to advance and transform industries, governments, economies and societies. For health, leveraging digital solutions can expand access to high-quality, affordable essential services and commodities to all. Additionally, digital health solutions can effectively and efficiently capture and synthesize information across all levels of the health system to improve performance and strengthen institutional capacity.