Oscar Jacob is a Senior Manager at Chemonics with over eight years of experience designing and implementing agricultural market development, investment facilitation, and climate finance programs in Sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti. He specializes in blended finance portfolio design, agribusiness resilience building, and operational planning and execution of multi-stakeholder projects. He is currently the Senior Manager…
The Kyrgyz Republic accounts for 6.3 million people, with a slow-growing, agriculture-led economy. Although economic growth is steady, employment opportunities have lagged. This has forced many people to leave so that they can seek income-generating opportunities elsewhere, which has created economic and social obstacles to peaceful and prosperous living. The central government has historically neglected…
Luis Fernando Jara is a forestry and climate change expert with 40 years of experience in project design and management, capacity building, and development of the forestry sector across the climatically diverse regions within Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Perú, Ecuador, and other parts of Latin America. He has extensive leadership experience in technical and managerial…
The USAID Awards for Digital Development (“the Digis”) recognize projects and activities that apply digital technologies and data-driven approaches to meet development objectives. In 2020, projects implemented by Chemonics earned two of the five Digis USAID awarded from a pool of 140 applications. Among this year’s winners, the Pakistan Small and Medium Enterprise Activity (SMEA)…
Join UNLEASH and Chemonics during the closing event of the upcoming Global Youth Economic Opportunities Summit on October 29 at 10:15 a.m. EDT to observe our innovation skills-building session with youth attendees and listen to testimonials about how targeted investment in youth has led to sustainable development outcomes. Currently, half of the world’s population is…
Biodiversity loss is one of Central America’s most pressing challenges. The five-year, $13.9 million USAID Regional Program for the Management of Aquatic Resources and Economic Alternatives, implemented by Chemonics International, was developed to strengthen coastal-marine resource management and biodiversity conservation while improving the livelihoods of local populations. Population growth in coastal marine areas, climate change,…
In Tunisia, high unemployment — particularly among college-educated youth — has been an ongoing source of sociopolitical tension and has left some Tunisian youth more susceptible to recruitment by extremist political groups. This is especially true in Tunisia’s rural regions, which are economically disadvantaged. For Tunisia to succeed politically and economically, it must focus on…
Colloquially named “the breadbasket of Africa,” Zimbabwe is endowed with agricultural lands hospitable to a wide range of crops and livestock. However, counterproductive agricultural policies and practices, a lack of access to affordable resources — such as fertilizer and feed — and water scarcity have hindered agricultural productivity. Food insecurity is now high, and Zimbabweans in…
With only 7 percent of its territory arable, Tajikistan’s land is valuable. Although the country took steps to allow citizens to freely buy and sell rights to use the land, the lack of national appraisal standards and professional institutions to support their implementation made it difficult to determine how the land should be priced for…
In August 2012, when Safar Tagoev established dehkan farm “Shohob-1” in Tajikistan’s Yovon District, he planned to use the land to improve his economic livelihood and grow food for his family. In October 2013, however, district authorities seized more than half of his 74 hectares, distributing them to other farms and a commercial entity. The…
From 2016 to 2020, the Feed the Future Tajikistan Land Market Development Activity worked with the State Unitary Enterprise for the Registration of Immovable Property (SUERIP) to streamline the process for land users to formalize their land use rights. This included promoting key regulations, which led to national implementation of a single-window approach and automated…
From November 2016 to September 2020, the Feed the Future (FTF) Land Market Development Activity (LMDA) increased Tajikistan’s agricultural competitiveness and self-reliance by facilitating the emergence of a functioning, gender equitable land market. Focusing on 12 target districts in Tajikistan’s Khatlon region, LMDA worked through four mutually reinforcing tasks to advance reforms, strengthen private and…