From 2015 through 2021, Chemonics led multiple early grade reading reform activities under the USAID All Children Reading Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity Contract. These activities include programming in Senegal to support the Ministry of National Education’s Lecture Pour Tous program; in Rwanda under the Soma Umenye project; and in Tajikistan for the Read with Me project.…
This brief focuses on the role of certification schemes for agricultural products by tracking the creation of Georgian Good Agricultural Practices (GeoGAP). GeoGAP is a scaled-down version of the internationally recognized Global Good Agricultural Practices (GLOBALG.A.P.) and helps meet local demand for safe, traceable food. The certification was created by the Georgian Farmers’ Association with…
The Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) Team at Chemonics reviews solicitations to which we respond and track degrees of gender mainstreaming and social inclusion across regions and technical sectors. The brief delves into GESI trends observed between 2018-2020 and includes deeper investigation of disability inclusion, minority inclusion, and safeguarding trends in solicitation design. The…
These briefs serve as a reference point for development practitioners interested in leveraging blended finance approaches in project design and delivery and improving the quality of engagement with the private sector. They include a primer that provides a targeted, high-level overview of blended finance mechanisms to contextualize the sector-specific technical briefs. The briefs also articulate…
This technical brief shows how poor energy governance damages energy access and efforts to improve the quality and reliability of power. It explains the political reasons why energy governance is so poor in many countries and contrasts this with the current system of procuring technical assistance, which largely ignores the energy governance challenge. It shows…
This case study is one in a series highlighting Chemonics’ experiences and lessons learned with thinking and working politically and applied political economy analysis (APEA). Drawing on the Chemonics-implemented USAID/Guatemala Biodiversity Project, this case study highlights the process, findings, and tools of the project’s baseline APEA (and second APEA iteration) and how these APEAs oriented…
Women in Haiti are often at social, political, and economic disadvantages compared to their male counterparts, as evidenced by Haiti’s ranking in the Gender Inequality Index. The gap is especially significant and consequential for rural women who engage primarily in subsistence farming with little to no access to or control over productive assets and financial…
This brief describes how projects in Mali and Haiti applied of the Innovation Adoption Measurement Approach, developed by Chemonics expert Dr. Tom Fattori, to support adaptive management on resilience-focused projects. This approach takes the findings from an innovation adoption assessment and identifies specific and actionable recommendations for targeting and improving the adoption of practices that…
This brief focuses on three key lessons learned — the importance of social capital for resilience, leveraging social capital to establish community buy-in, and linking resilience activities to specific shocks. The USAID Reforestation project team applied this learning to implement a refined reforestation approach, which may be relevant to other projects incorporating components of resilience-building,…
Haiti’s trees and environment are the country’s natural capital. However, increasing population, migration to urban areas, worsening poverty, and lack of coherent national agricultural or energy policy has accelerated deforestation, severely limiting livelihood options for Haitian farmers. Increasingly, farmers depend on producing charcoal to rapidly growing urban areas to make ends meet, but inhaling smoke…
This strategic brief is an overview of lessons learned on scaling Aflasafe through commercialization in sub-Saharan Africa. The resource describes that challenges to scale-up include low awareness, inadequate market incentives, and poorly enforced policies. It also gives an overview of the five-phase “science to scale” process, and how this was implemented in-country. Finally, the brief…
Aflasafe requires an innovative approach for technology transfer and commercialization. This brief reviews the five steps to Aflasafe’s commercialization, provides an overview of country progress, and describes where Aflasafe has successfully been commercialized on the African continent as of November 2019. The brief also discusses challenges encountered, lessons learned, and next steps for Aflasafe expansion…