Redefining Finance for Agriculture: Green Agricultural Credit for Smallholders in Peru

  • Partner: Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA), International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
  • Publication Type: Brief
  • Date: December 2019

MarketShare Associates (MSA) was engaged as MEDA’s learning partner on INNOVATE, and produced a series of briefs highlighting key results and learnings from the research portfolio assessing the potential of non-traditional finance to stimulate agricultural innovation adoption among smallholder farmers in South Asia, South America and East Africa. MSA produced this brief summarizing key findings and recommendations for government actors and financial institutions from the case study conducted by Global Canopy on “Redefining Finance for Agriculture: Green Agricultural Credit for Smallholders in Peru”.

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Smallholders as Customers, Not Pupils: Making the Case for Good Agricultural Practices

  • Partner: Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA), International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
  • Publication Type: Blog
  • Date: November 12, 2019

With the growing prevalence of Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) requirements, smallholder farmers face a business investment decision involving substantial risk and complexity. This blog post, co-authored by MSA as learning partner of the MEDA INNOVATE initiative, makes the case for embracing a business orientation in GAP promotion and provides recommendations for taking a customer-centric approach to engaging smallholder farmers.

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The private sector: an ally in the fight against GBV in agriculture?

  • Partner: Feed the Future Advancing Women’s Empowerment (AWE) program consortium, USAID
  • Publication Type: Blog Post
  • Date: October 2019

The economic costs of gender-based violence (GBV) are immense and preventing and mitigating GBV saves money. For businesses, costs associated with GBV include absenteeism, loss of productivity, and time spent outside of work at court or participating in services for survivors. This blog post unpacks the potential benefits and risks of engaging the private sector in addressing GBV. The MSA team also shares promising examples of development sector and private sector partnerships in Egypt and Sierra Leone and looks to what’s next for partnering with the private sector in market systems and agricultural programming.

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Working with the Private Sector to Empower Women: How to Build the Business Case for Change

  • Partner: Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund (AWEF), DAI, The SEEP Network, UK Department for International Development (DFID)
  • Publication Type: Webinar
  • Date: July 24, 2019

In this webinar, speakers from MarketShare Associates (MSA), the Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund (AWEF), and BSR discussed how a compelling business case can help firms understand why women’s inclusion and empowerment is important for their mission and values, business model and stakeholders. MSA also shared diverse approaches, tools, data and metrics from the Practitioner Learning Brief, Working with the Private Sector to Empower Women: How YOU Can Build a Business Case for Change (2019), produced by MSA as part of the AWEF project.

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7 Lessons in Shifting Social Norms for Women’s Economic Empowerment

  • Partner: The SEEP Network Women’s Economic Empowerment Working Group
  • Publication Type: Blog
  • Date: July 23, 2019

MarketShare Associates moderated a side event on “Shifting Social Norms for Women's Economic Empowerment” hosted by the SEEP Network at the 2019 Women Deliver Conference in Vancouver, Canada. This blog post summarizes seven lessons learned in shifting social norms for women’s economic empowerment. The session explored how members of SEEP’s Women’s Economic Empowerment Working Group have tackled gender norms in the context of their work in developing countries. Speakers from Oxfam, IPSOS, Women for Women International, ICRW, World Vision International, and MEDA drew on practical examples and strategies for understanding, measuring and changing social norms.

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Working with the Private Sector to Empower Women: What to Measure and How to Build the Business Case for Change

  • Partner: Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund (AWEF), DAI, UK Department for International Development (DFID)
  • Publication Type: Practitioner Learning Brief
  • Date: July 2019

As part of the Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund (AWEF) project, MarketShare Associates produced a Practitioner Learning Brief on using a market systems and private sector development approach to stimulate increased women’s economic empowerment. This Brief provides a practical framework for development actors to develop a robust business case for private sector companies around both the commercial and social value of empowering women. Building on the direct experience from implementing AWEF over four years, as well as case studies from the wider practitioner community, the Brief presents a range of business frameworks, approaches, tools, data and metrics that can be used to build a compelling business case to the private sector.

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Working with the Private Sector to Empower Women: How YOU Can Build a Business Case for Change

  • Partner: Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund (AWEF), DAI, UK Department for International Development (DFID)
  • Publication Type: Blog
  • Date: July 18, 2019

This blog post builds on MarketShare Associates' (MSA) work as part of the Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund (AWEF) to stimulate increased women’s economic empowerment through a market systems approach. The MSA team outlines a practical framework for development actors to develop a robust business case for private sector companies around both the commercial and social value of empowering women.

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Feed the Future Mozambique Agricultural Innovations Activity (FTF Inova) Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) Plan

  • Partner: Feed the Future Mozambique Agricultural Innovations Activity (FTF Inova), United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
  • Publication Type: Report
  • Date: May 2019

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Feed the Future Mozambique Agricultural Innovations Activity (FTF Inova) seeks to stimulate sustainable, agriculture-led economic growth, which is critical to reducing poverty and hunger. The aim is to contribute to this change by catalyzing more inclusive and competitive agricultural market systems. This Plan sets out FTF Inova’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) System and explains how results are monitored and measured to support strategic, informed, and adaptive management of interventions, while allowing FTF Inova to report on achieved results.

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Empowerment-Forward Poverty Mapping: Real-Time Learning from the Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund’s Disadvantaged Assessment

  • Partner: Arab Women's Enterprise Fund (AWEF)
  • Publication Type: Brief
  • Date: 2017

Funded by the U.K. Department for International Development, the Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund (AWEF) blends market systems and empowerment-thinking to stimulate women’s economic empowerment across Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine. This learning brief captures the experience of the AWEF team in developing a gender-sensitive, empowerment-forward poverty mapping tool: the Disadvantaged Assessment.

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Women’s Economic Empowerment: Practical Tools for Gender-responsive Poverty Measurement

  • Partner: Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund (AWEF), DAI, The SEEP Network, UK Department for International Development (DFID)
  • Publication Type: Webinar
  • Date: March 22, 2018

This webinar explored practical applications of poverty measurement tools that capture the multi-dimensional aspects of poverty and intra-household dynamics. Speakers discussed tools such as the Poverty Probability Index (PPI), the Individual Deprivation Measure and the Disadvantage Assessment, and their abilities to capture gender-responsive results.

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