Events

May 16, 2013
USAID

Effective value chain programming requires an understanding of how people respond to different kinds of incentives in value chains and how gender affects this response. Gendered patterns of behavior influence men and women’s knowledge of, ability, and incentives to participate in value chains and to upgrade in response to changing market conditions and new market opportunities. Promoting value chain development that is inclusive of and benefits both men and women relies on understanding these behaviors and identifying gender-based constraints to upgrading.

September 27, 2012
USAID

Putting ‘clients at the center’ is about more than just raising levels of adoption and usage of formal and informal financial services. It is also part of a broader thesis of client-led microfinance which argues that a client perspective to product design and delivery, building financial capabilities and the relationship between clients and operations together contribute to achieving sustainability and scale and are important if a financial service provider is to serve its market effectively.

July 26, 2012
USAID

Although projects may be designed with the intent of using a value chain approach, without effective internal operations and core staff capacities and behaviors they will likely fail at creating systemic change.

June 28, 2012

The value chain approach aims to achieve economic growth with poverty reduction, but there tends to be a poverty “frontier” beyond which value chain development programs struggle to engage. Join Marian Boquiren of SDCAsia and Anna Cuny Garloch of ACDI/VOCA to discuss emerging insights as to how the value chain approach can more effectively be leveraged to “pull” the very poor into markets in more gainful ways and improve their ability to access and succeed in opportunities created in a market system.

June 5, 2012 - June 7, 2012
USAID

The Speakers Corner, an ongoing, facilitated discussion over three days, will start around 8AM EST on June 5 and continue until about 6PM EST on June 7.

(EST 8:00, Lima 8:00, Accra 12:00, London 13:00, Nairobi 15:00, Moscow 16:00, Dehli 17:30, Jakarta 19:00, Beijing and Manila 20:00)

To participate with your KDID account, click "Log in to Join This Discussion."

If you are already logged in, click "Join This Speakers Corner."

May 22, 2012

The Tanzania Staples Value Chain Project – NAFAKA, implemented by ACDI/VOCA, is one of the 10 active Feed the Future projects in Tanzania. Chief of Party Lee Rosner will discuss NAFAKA’s market-driven, value chain approach to addressing food security concerns in the country, sharing both the challenges and successes encountered during the project’s first year of implementation.

May 17, 2012

Pastoralist societies supply the majority of the meat consumed in the Horn of Africa, a demand that increases as local and regional economies grow. However, pastoralists face both ecological and socio-political challenges, such as changes in land tenure policies, changes in land use for cropping, forced sedentarization, and extreme climate variability or climate change. As more pressure has been put on pastoralist grazing lands and water resources, coupled with growing populations and increasing urbanization, competition for resources has become even greater.

May 16, 2012

Saving is hard for most people, rich or poor, educated or not. Setting aside even small sums of money on a regular basis requires a conscious trade-off between buying something now in favor of achieving long-term goals, and even the most prosperous struggle to translate this intention into sustained savings. Saving may be especially difficult for poor individuals, as daily needs and family obligations may distract attention from meeting savings goals.

April 27, 2012

According to the latest "World report on disability," published jointly by the UN World Health Organization and the World Bank in 2011, one billion persons around the world live with a disability, of which a large proportion are in developing nations. As human interfaces in finance and commerce are replaced by digital interfaces and new payment systems, ensuring that these systems are accessible and operable by persons with disabilities is critical.

April 26, 2012

Development projects have been seeking to positively influence complex systems, such as farming systems, small business systems, governance systems, and value chain systems since the advent of international development as a field of practice. Working with these large systems has always been a challenge, and has generated a large number of approaches and models designed to guide development projects.