The USAID Punjab Enabling Environment Project (PEEP) was a seven-year (2014 to 2021), $18.48 million project that provided support to businesses through policy and regulatory reforms, improved infrastructure, and institutions. The project improved the enabling environment for the province’s agriculture sector and promoted private sector-led growth, with a focus on the horticulture and dairy and…
Since the end of its civil war, Lebanon has shown incredible resilience through recent events such as the Arab Spring and the Syrian armed conflict, which resulted in an influx of refugees and significant shifts in agricultural trading. The ongoing impact of the Beirut blast and the pandemic have only furthered the country’s extreme political…
Farmers who work the rich soil of the Okavango River Basin in the Kavango region of Namibia depend on rainfall to water their crops. In 2018 and 2019, the rain didn’t fall, and the worst drought in 90 years devastated fields, killed thousands of livestock, and left a third of Namibians without adequate food. Some…
Deforestation and the conversion of native vegetation linked to the soy supply chain are serious environmental concerns to key biomes in South America and obstacles to achieving sustainability in the agricultural sector. The Land Innovation Fund for Sustainable Livelihoods, established with an initial contribution from Cargill, is managed by Chemonics. The fund supports innovations that…
Mauricio Moscoso currently serves as the chief of party for Peru Institutional Strengthening Partnership for DEVIDA. He has over 15 years of experience in consulting, designing, and implementing economic development projects in Latin-American, Asia, and Eurasia. He has previously served as the general director of the Productive Development Department at the Ministry of Production in…
Andrew Baker currently serves as the chief of party for the Punjab (Pakistan) Enabling Environment Project. Previously, he served as a home office project management director and was responsible for the technical, contractual, and financial oversight of a USAID-funded portfolio of three projects totaling $36.7 million. He also served as the deputy team lead and…
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…
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…
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…