Publication database

This 2019 edition of Africa’s Development Dynamics explores policies for productive transformation in Africa. It proposes three main policy focus for transforming firms: providing business services to clusters of firms; developing regional production networks; and improving exporting firms’ ability to thrive in fast-changing markets.

Commendable progress has been made across many parts of Africa over the past years to increase agricultural productivity, reduce hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, create new employment opportunities for young people and improve the livelihoods of rural communities. Yet, demographic change, urbanization, shifting diets and climatic changes mean that pressure is growing on food systems to make more food and more varied and nutritious food available and accessible.  How African countries position themselves to harness and deploy digital technologies will determine the future competitiveness of African agriculture and its contribution to African economies.

The current report — Byte by byte: policy innovation for transforming Africa’s food system with digital technologies— summarizes the key findings of a systematic analysis of what seven African countries at the forefront of progress on digitalization of the agriculture sector have done right. It analyzes which institutional and policy innovations were implemented and which actions by the private sector and agtech start-ups were taken to increase the development and use of digital tools and services in the agriculture value chain. The objective of this report is to identify interventions that work and benefit farmers and other actors in the value chain and recommend options for policy and program innovation that allow countries to develop a digitalization ecosystem in which digital technologies and services can be developed and used to foster growth and competitiveness in Africa’s agriculture value chains. 

Unleashing Private Capital for Global Health Innovation takes stock of the needs of innovators and investors. This report:

• Lays out the challenges and opportunities of innovating and investing in global health
• Proposes a catalytic early stage “Innovator Support Facility” designed to increase the number of promising innovators successfully navigating the “valley of death” and reaching a point where they can attract and absorb more traditional sources of private capital
• Proposes a blended finance & global health “Investor Support Facility” designed to provide low cost risk capital to offset lower risk-adjusted returns in global health and ‘crowd-in’ a wider array of private investors

Around the globe, a wave of innovation is sweeping across the financial sector, from public equities to bonds, real estate to insurance, venture investing to small-business lending. In each of these areas, innovative players are using an ever-growing range of instruments to achieve social and environmental benefits, while producing attractive returns. This is the exciting field of sustainable finance, and it is growing fast. Nowhere is the opportunity for sustainable finance greater than in Asia, and only a sliver of this opportunity has been realized.

This report addresses the opportunity for the private sector to play a role in developing digital payment systems. It highlights various sectors where these opportunities are largely untapped and where global companies can leverage their networks to help bring consumers into the digital economy.

Part 1 of this report discusses instrumental and infrastructural approaches to ID and argues for long-term investments in ID infrastructure. Institutions and individuals each have key roles in the ID ecosystem, and we will discuss the tensions inherent in trying to serve both. Part 2 of this report asks how the ID landscape is changing. Emerging technologies will expand the options for identifying and authenticating individuals and introduce new actors across the DID value chain. While some emerging trends may offer greater opportunity for inclusion, higher confidence in authentication, or better data security, new technologies and new actors may also change the roles of traditional ID-granting institutions and their relationships with ID-holding individuals. How we address these emerging trends in technology will determine whether ID is an instrument of empowerment and inclusion or surveillance, disempowerment, and exclusion.

This workbook has been conceived as a practical tool for innovators working in the agricultural sector to reach and effectively serve the untapped market of women smallholder farmers in emerging economies. The workbook reviews existing resources and tools for designing and marketing products, services, and technologies, provides a way to assess barriers and opportunities for reaching the missing market of women farmers, and recommends specific tools and processes for the entire business cycle, from product design to market entry, retention, and growth.

BIF engages with businesses either by first identifying a market in which to operate, and then finding appropriate companies with whom to work; or by identifying multinationals that are looking to innovate, and then introducing a programme to develop the market in which they are working. This report explores examples from both of these strands and distils learning from three countries.