Youth entrepreneurship in the agricultural sector can provide direct career opportunities for young innovators while also promoting a cascade of positive economic outcomes for other young people along the agricultural value chain and reducing the carbon footprint of food production.
Lucine Le Moal is the managing director of the USAID Invest activity which provides investment advice and facilitation for businesses and investors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Previously, Lucine led ELAN, a UK aid project in the DRC that supported the development of the private sector for seven years, especially in the…
Money is going digital, full steam ahead. Within the past five years, interest around Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) has exploded. Nearly 100 CBDCs are currently in research or development stages, with CBDCs in Nigeria and the Bahamas already launched. Unlike volatile cryptocurrency assets (e.g., bitcoin and stablecoins), CBDCs offer promising development benefits through central…
There is increasing pressure on International Finance Institutions (IFI) and Development Finance Institutions (DFI) to drive market additionality and creation in lower-income countries and emerging market economies. These institutions regard market creation as key to closing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) financing gap. Market creation requires development finance actors to invest in small- and early-stage…
Although agriculture has been a cornerstone of the Ugandan economy for generations, many farmers in the East African republic earned barely enough in 2013 to provide schooling for their children. Having grown up in smallholder farming families themselves, agri-tech entrepreneurs William Luyinda, Esther Karwera, and Zilla Mary Arach knew these struggles all too well. “Unfortunately,…
This post originally appeared in Foreign Policy’s April Issue. Mert Tangonan was stuck. It was 2017, and Tangonan, a native of the Philippines, wanted to persuade the country’s largest banks to accept digital payments. With 99% of the transactions conducted in cash or checks across the nation’s 7,000 islands, the banks had little incentive to…
Max McGrath-Horn is a specialist in the design and financing of climate change solutions, mobilization of cross-sector partnerships, negotiation with government stakeholders, and crowding-in private finance. He is currently senior climate finance advisor in Chemonics’ Climate Group. Previously, Max worked at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, where he managed the Green Climate Fund…