Resource Library

This post shares a new report from Mercy Corps highlighting how government restrictions to stop the spread of COVID-19 has impacted businesses, supply chain, markets and local economies.

This post introduces an April 2020 publication from ACDI/VOCA. Marginalized people become even more vulnerable in emergencies, which means that it’s important to consider how to incorporate a gender and social inclusion lens into our COVID-19 responses and adaptations.

This blog post introduces the USAID-funded CVCFG (Commercially Viable Conflict-Free Gold) project, which aims to establish a responsibly-sourced, artisanal gold supply chain that originates in eastern DRC.

This post introduces a resource that provides guidance on how to use the Microfin financial projection software.

EEFS' technical one-pager highlights learning from the full eastern DRC SeedCLIR report, two technical articles, and a global webinar to describe how development actors and policymakers can facilitate an improved enabling environment for seed in DRC through a phased approach.

Marketlinks, Agrilinks, and the Feed the Future Enabling Environment for Food Security (EEFS) project hosted a joint webinar on Thursday, February 6, 2020, examining the enabling environment for agricultural market systems in fragile contexts.

In this primer, CGAP applies a framework to help answer these questions and demonstrate how regulation can have a substantial impact on competitive dynamics in the DFS marketplace.

This is the third post in a series exploring how a partnership facility can work as an interface between donor-funded programs and their private-sector partners, and how the partnerships that emerge can be an engine driving systemic change.

This brief aims to demonstrate how the use of applied political economy analysis is critical to the effective design and execution of inclusive market systems activities.

CGAP analyzes how MFIs around the world are using mobile money, the obstacles they encounter, and what’s working best.

This was the final plenary session of the 2012 SEEP Annual Conference and focused on emerging methodologies designed to assist the ultra poor to build financial and non-financial assets, including their savings and entrepreneurial skills.

This research project provides a set of recommendations to donors and development agencies to formulate more efficient and timely workforce development initiatives that will enhance economic as well as social upgrading.

This research paper shares findings from a large-scale randomized control trial conducted in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. The paper describes the poverty profile of community members that participate in CRS' Savings and Internal Lending Communities and shows that CRS is reaching the very poor. Additionally, communities that paid for SILC services through Private Service Providers achieved greater resilience than those that received subsidized support through the traditional field agent approach.     About SILC Innovations

The report demonstrates how microfinance can be further leveraged to provide a powerful tool to address one of India’s persistent barriers to the economic advancement of the poor: ill health caused by lack of access to health services.

In this paper, Dr. Pascaline Drupas and Jonathan Robinson used data from a field experiment in Kenya to explore why providing individuals with simple, informal savings techniques can increase investment in preventive health and reduce vulnerability to health shocks.

This paper is intended to raise the challenges and limitations of market-based approaches with the broader community of development practitioners employing market-based approaches and share approaches Oxfam has taken to address them.

This research identifies and analyzes factors that contribute to slow uptake of mobile money in Ghana.

This paper looks at corruption within the private sector. It begins with examples of administrative corruption and state capture.

EMMA is a set of tools and guidance notes. It encourages and assists front-line humanitarian staff in sudden-onset emergencies to better understand, accommodate and make use of market-systems. It does not offer a simplistic blueprint for action. However, EMMA does provide accessible, relevant guidance to staff who are not already specialists in market analysis. The EMMA toolkit adds value to established humanitarian practices in diverse contexts.

Can VSLAs contribute to food security by increasing food availability & access? Case studies in Sierra Leon and Tanzania show that they do?

Turning Economic Growth into Nutrition-Sensitive Growth reviews the available evidence for the link between economic growth and improvements in nutrition. It reaches several conclusions. First, economic growth is necessary but not sufficient to impact nutritional status. Further, growth in agriculture is generally more beneficial for nutrition than growth in non-agricultural sectors, though this depends upon the size of the sector, the resulting impacts on food availability, and the extent to which food security is a challenge.

This thesis highlights the unintended consequences of CCT programs. It also attempts to identify the causal pathways that led to the implementation of targeted, conditional cash transfer programs in sixteen countries in Latin America.

This resource provides a coherent and helpful summary of the Michigan State University (MSU)’s Food Security Group’s research, primarily from Sub-Saharan Africa. Lessons are presented in four areas: The first, Agricultural Growth and Food Security Strategies, suggests that small shrinking farm sizes in many countries will prevent many farmers from escaping poverty from on-farm production alone. Investments in education and non-agricultural sectors will be important.

This short brief finds that gender is a critical factor shaping the impact of agricultural programming on food security and health. The paper suggests that positive impacts are more likely when the agricultural intervention enhances women's control over assets and includes nutrition education to ensure better use of additional food or income.  The brief presents three agricultural development strategies in terms of their gender impacts — household food production, linking smallholders to markets, and large-scale agriculture — and recommends ways to ensure that each of these strate

This presentation by TechnoServe presents the organization's strategy for improving nutrition through its work with the private sector. Five strategies are outlined: nutritional reviews, food fortification, commercialization of nutritious food, crop diversification, and encouraging embedded nutritional services by value chain actors. The presentation briefly examples two examples of how this strategy could be applied.