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The Smallholder-Supermarket Disconnect: Addressing the Missing Links that Separate East African Farmers from Formal Retail Markets
Smallholder farmers are the backbone of East African agriculture, accounting for approximately 75% of production in several countries. At the same time, formal food retail is expanding across the region. Yet as Daniel Njiwa at AGRA and Kris Ansin and Audrey Tsoi at TechnoServe explain, despite this alignment, the formal retail market remains inaccessible to many smallholder farmers, as a range of barriers prevent them from supplying these vendors. They share learnings from a pilot program that highlighted some of these constraints, and explore how supermarkets can work through aggregators that consolidate and coordinate supply from multiple farmers to source smallholder produce at scale.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Analysis: The Offline Messaging Apps Challenging Internet Shutdowns
Across the globe, state-enforced internet blackouts have become a primary weapon against protests and independent journalism during political crises.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Ghana Launches National Union for Informal Waste Workers
According to GAYO, the union will provide a unified platform for informal waste workers to engage government, municipalities, industries and development partners.
- Categories
- Environment, WASH
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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The Catch-22 in Global Health Finance: Why Medical Oxygen is the Test Case for Turning Aid into Investment
By most measures, medical oxygen in sub-Saharan Africa isn’t an investable market. As Alex Losneanu and Jason Houdek at Oxygen CoLab explain, providing medical oxygen is capital-intensive and operationally demanding. That means small- and medium-sized oxygen suppliers typically stall out or get absorbed into grant-funded programs instead of becoming commercially viable, and funders conclude that these SMEs are too fragile to justify the investment risk. They argue that this conclusion is wrong, and also self-fulfilling, reinforcing a Catch-22 that exists across global health. They share findings from a supplier mapping project that show how emerging business models are enabling oxygen SMEs to scale, and propose three shifts in how catalytic capital can be designed to support these and other businesses across the global health sector.
- Categories
- Health Care, Investing
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African Development Fund Grants $4.3 Million to Strengthen Integration of Natural Capital Into Decision-Making in 13 African Countries
The strategy aims to strengthen policy-making systems, statistical systems, institutional frameworks, and knowledge-generation mechanisms needed by the regional member countries participating in the project and the African Development Bank Group to assess natural capital and incorporate it into public policy-making.
- Categories
- Environment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Healthy Diet Too Expensive for One in Three People Globally, UN Report Finds
Global hunger declined for the third year in a row in 2025 but experts call for action to bring down costs of fruit, vegetables and dairy as report shows 2.69bn people can’t afford to eat well.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Region
- Global
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Making Waste Pay: The Keys to Sustaining Paying Customers in Solid Waste Management
Despite growing discourse around the revenue potential of waste to wealth — i.e., reimagining waste as a valuable resource — profitability in municipal solid waste management remains low in India and other low- and middle-income countries. As Vishwanath Varma, Archana Masih, Diksha Rana and Ashish Kapil at Waste Warriors Society argue, this challenge has led to a growing focus on collecting user fees from households — yet that goal is easier said than done. They share analysis based on Waste Warriors Society’s user fee records and customer surveys, which reveals key insights on how to retain paying customers in solid waste management and other user fee-based models of social entrepreneurship.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, WASH
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The Blind Spot in the EU’s New Deforestation Regulations: Laws and Satellites Don’t Save Forests — People Do
The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) represents an ambitious legislative effort to protect our planet’s remaining forests. But Priscillia Moulin at MosaiX highlights a potential flaw in the regulations: To meet the EUDR's data requirements and prove that their supply chains are deforestation-free, major commodity buyers are turning to remote sensing and satellite AI — and if these technologies detect any tree-cover loss, the path of least resistance is often to permanently exclude that supplier. She argues that this creates the illusion of compliance while pushing vulnerable small farmers into the grey market, as satellite algorithms can identify changes in forest cover but cannot determine intent or causality, or assess other complex realities on the ground. She proposes three ways companies can comply with the EUDR without freezing smallholders out of the EU's premium, regulated markets.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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