Publication database

This brief article points out different aspects of innovation in low-income countries as well crucial impeding factors of innovations.

Between November 2018 and November 2019, Gates Foundation and Mars Edge discussed collaboration opportunities to accelerate the urban go-to-market strategy of Mars Edge’s nutritious savory snack GoMo™, specifically designed to help address nutritional deficiencies of 6-18 year olds in India, with a focus on reaching low-income consumers. The Growth for Growth (G4G) network of service providers set up by the Foundation’s PSP program co-designed this strategy to reach lower-income urban areas. In December 2019, the PSP approved a grant to assess and adapt the model during a market test. As part of the grant, the collaboration between G4G and Mars then continued until December 2020. This case study aims to share the lessons learned throughout this journey, in terms of public-private collaboration and innovation process.

This study by the Universal Postal Union (UPU) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) delves into the transformative potential of postal networks into well-suited providers of insurance. The report concludes by presenting three types of business models in which postal insurance can help advancing financial inclusion through insurance access.

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.

Blended finance could be one of the best ways to attract the extra trillion dollars from the private sector to meet the annual US$6 trillion needed to achieve the SDGs. The majority of this money will be needed for sustainable infrastructure projects in emerging markets, which are often seen as too risky for mainstream investors. Using public funds can attract private investment by mitigating these risks, blending public and private capital could be a win-win for both investors and global development. But the blended finance market needs to scale in order to get from billions of dollars of aid or public funds from the development banks to trillions of dollars of private investment.  The Blended Finance Taskforce calls for leadership to develop the blended finance action plan in order to get to scale.

This report provides an in-depth study on the issue of market based solutions, reviewing when they do and don't achieve scale; why more market-based models are not achieving scale; and what barriers to scale that are faced. It describes market-based solutions that have achieved scale and how this has been achieved, and It discusses the journey to scale for entrepreneurial enterprises and larger companies serving poor consumers with beneficial products, and for those engaging poor producers.

This paper looks at opportunities where blended finance can mobilise large scale private capital for clean energy. It synthesises vast knowledge and proposes a path forward. It evaluates, by geography and clean energy sub-sector, the most significant opportunities for impact on both climate change and energy access per dollar invested; the risks and barriers that prevent investment; and how blended finance could be deployed to address investor needs.

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. 

ITGI piloted radio frequency identification devices to address problems with claims. It used the introduction as an opportunity to change its processes. Find out how these changes allowed it to better serve its clients and improve the viability of the scheme in Case Brief #2.

Financing health for low income households is a significant challenge. Naya Jeevan is trying an innovative approach: in order to make quality health services affordable to low-income workers in Pakistan, it seeks sponsors to pay the majority of the premium on behalf of workers whom they employ or have a business relationship with.