Cynthia Steen serves as chief of party of the USAID Moldova High Value Agriculture Activity (HVAA) and has previously led agribusiness and enterprise development projects in multiple countries, including Egypt, Albania, Jamaica, Lebanon, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. HVAA is successfully demonstrating production, post-harvest, and marketing techniques to make Moldova a more competitive exporter, creating sustainable opportunities…
Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Execute a few simple steps. Do it again and again and … poof, success! While this formulaic approach may work for some organizational processes, the path toward a successful diversity and inclusion (D&I) program for your workplace can be nonlinear and messy. For those of us who have worked in this arena,…
Jeff Wuorinen is the senior vice president of Chemonics’ U.K. Division. He oversees all aspects of development program design and delivery for U.K. clients, including the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development (DFID). He also leads engagement with British and regional suppliers, particularly small businesses, NGOs, and academic institutions. 1. Why…
Several years ago, a colleague was telling me about his efforts to introduce a new family planning method in one of the countries he worked in. “The women just weren’t interested in this method,” he said, frustrated. Initially, he and his team of experts couldn’t figure out why. They’d done a lot of legwork to…
In global health supply chains, the geographic spread of delivery is often vast, the diseases we respond to are complex, and the potential risks for public health emergencies or supply chain interruptions are ever-present. This makes continual improvement that much more critical. Chemonics recognized this critical need in 2015 with the award of the $9.5…
Malaria is a silent killer and a health risk for many around the world. It causes about half a million deaths each year, with over 90 percent of those occurring in sub-Saharan Africa alone. As the third most common cause of death in women of reproductive age in Africa, malaria poses increased risk for pregnant…
We’d like you to meet Dzenita Kolja! Dzenita serves as managing director of the Audit Preparedness Unit within Chemonics’ Global Health Supply Chain Office. Once an aid beneficiary herself, she shares her development journey from Bosnia to the U.S. and what draws her to this work. Dzenita is one reason #DevelopmentWorksHere. 1. Can you tell…
Stop, Look, and Listen! Preventing Recruitment of Youth into Illicit Activities in Southern Colombia
This post originally appeared on Harvard’s Center for International Development’s Building State Capability program’s blog. The authors successfully completed the 15-week Practice of Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation online course. This is their story. As development practitioners, we tend to rush in with solutions to deal with complex problems. We impose so-called best practices without digging…
According to the World Report on Disability, more than one billion people (15 percent of the world’s population), have a disability, and most children with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries have limited to no access to education. Though staggering, this statistic is likely higher because we have a hard time measuring disability. As a…
For the past decade, Mexico has faced a serious human rights crisis. More than 35,000 people have gone missing since 2006, their whereabouts still unknown. The National Commission of Human Rights has documented several alarming, unlawful killings of civilians by Mexican security forces without any authorities being charged. And torture continues to be a common…
This post originally appeared on the DevResults blog. Back in September, Chemonics and DevResults spoke at MERL Tech DC about the inherent compromise involved when purchasing enterprise software. In short, if you want good software that does everything you want exactly the way you want it, cheap software that is affordable and sustainable, and fast…
As international development professionals, we strive for sustainable project results and an evidence base for our approaches. But the truth is we don’t always know what happens to our efforts after a project closes. Chemonics recently conducted a self-financed ex-post study of a former agriculture project to fill that information gap. While the team did…