Access to financial services enables rural households to build financial security, start enterprises, and insure against risks. This access, in turn, generates secondary benefits, improving resilience, health, nutrition, and broad-based economic growth. In 2015, USAID launched the Rural Finance Initiative (RFI), implemented by Chemonics International, to provide technical assistance to financial institutions in Colombia so that they could identify profitable opportunities…
Estefania McPhaul is an economic growth and trade specialist with more than ten years of progressive experience managing complex economic growth projects for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and the International Development Bank. Estefania currently serves as global practice lead of Chemonics’ Economic Growth and Trade (EGT) practice where…
How can we forge better partnerships to drive agricultural productivity, incomes, and nutrition? How can we use data to empower people and foster resilience? What are the best ways to engage the private sector to make financial services inclusive? Chemonics will discuss these questions and more at the 2019 Small Enterprise Education and Promotion (SEEP)…
Globally, new momentum is building for the private sector’s participation in alleviating migration crises worldwide and supporting migrants’ and refugees’ integration. From investing in migrant-owned businesses to engaging a migrant workforce or securing resources for optimal basic service delivery for migrants and host communities, private sector engagement offers unique avenues for helping to solve migration…
We’d like you to meet Razan Quossous! Razan is an economic growth expert with 20 years of experience, including private sector development and increasing access to finance. Now the business enabling environment component leader for a tourism project in Jordan, Razan shares her insights on how development work can spur economic growth to improve lives.…
Razan Quossous is an economic growth expert with more than 20 years of experience in the sector. Razan currently serves as the deputy chief of party and commercial sector lead for the USAID Recycling in Jordan Activity. Her technical expertise includes strengthening business enabling environments, economic reform, increasing access to finance, private sector development, investment promotion,…
If we’re going to make development dollars go further, we need to build on and learn from our experiences as implementors. Recognizing this, we revisited several frequently requested economic growth resources produced by Chemonics, our partners, and USAID through the USAID Financial Sector Knowledge Sharing Project (FS Share), which closed in 2012. While reviewing the…
Through the Financial Sector Knowledge Sharing Project (FS Share), USAID, in collaboration with its Bureau for Economic Growth Agriculture and Trade (EGAT) and Chemonics International, identified financial sector priorities and developed strategies and programs for growing the financial sector. FS Share also identified financial sector best practices and aggregated those best practices through model scopes…
The objective of this deliverable is to help United States government economic growth program designers identify reforms to facilitate the development of efficient government securities markets (GSMs), for the primary market in which government securities (GS) are issued and for the secondary market in which GS are traded. It presents case studies based on recent…
This primer’s objective is to provide U.S. government program designers with a basic technical understanding of branchless banking as a sustainable approach to increase access to financial services. The primer is designed as a practical tool to enable program designers to integrate best practices and lessons learned into effective economic growth programming.
Through the FS Share Task Order, the USAID Bureau for Economic Growth Agriculture and Trade (EGAT) and Chemonics collaboratively identify financial-sector priorities and develop strategies and programs for growing the financial sector. This paper describes the experience of USAID programs in Albania, Georgia, Egypt, and Colombia as they apply to the design and implementation of initiatives…
While considerable progress has been made in establishing a legal and regulatory environment and the institutional infrastructure to support development of a securities market in Azerbaijan, the market remains underdeveloped and slowly developing. Notable constraints to market development include those associated with the market’s organizational and operational infrastructure, corporate governance, the protection of investors’ rights,…