Two ANDE event organizers recount their learnings from organizing ANDE's annual conference virtually in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
On September 24, 2020, Geigy Mathews and Denis Karema from Enviu hosted a Solution Salon entitled "Eliminating waste to 0% in the textile & food chain, impossible?" as part of ANDE's 2020 Annual Conference. The session highlighted the complex, multi-sector solutions that will be required in order to facilitate the transition towards fully circular textile and food sectors.
I-DEV International is a leading business strategy & investment advisory firm specializing in emerging markets. ANDE spoke with Patricia Chin-Sweeney, Co-Founder and Director, to learn more about I-DEV’s latest initiatives and how ANDE members can get involved.
Note about the piece: I had the honor of moderating the Closing Plenaries for the ANDE Conference on the Future of the SGB Sector in a Covid-19 Post Recovery. We focused on two of the ANDE pillars in the morning plenary: Decent Work & Economic Growth and Gender Equality with our panelists Payal Dalal at Mastercard and Jimmy Bettcher at Partners at Food Solutions. And the other two pillars in the evening plenary: Climate Change & Environmental Action and Diversity & Equity in Action with Anita Ramachandran at MicroMentor and Ernesto Herrera Guerra at Reforestamos.
In 2019, the West African entrepreneurial ecosystem experienced major development, with the rise of tech hubs and impact investing activities. There was particularly an increase in direct and indirect investment funds from Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), as indicated in ANDE’s recent State of the Small and Growing Business Sector report.
Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation is a USAID-funded program that works to build partnerships with agribusinesses to help them sell new products and services to smallholder farmers, who represent a potential market of 500 million customers. Through this program, partner businesses are provided with investment assistance, expert guidance and the technical support they need to expand in emerging markets and create a growing customer base for their agricultural innovations. Since 2012, Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation has worked with 65 private sector partners in 24 countries, which have introduced 132 new agricultural technologies to over 1.4 million smallholder farmers.
Thanks to some hard work, new tech skills, and the patience and continued dedication of our incredible members, we consider the first virtual Annual Conference a success! This year, we welcomed around 250 participants across 148 organizations and 42 countries; our 49 speakers and moderators alone spanned sixteen countries.
"Impact Investing in Latin America: Trends 2018-2019" provides a snapshot of the impact investing sector in Latin America over the past two years, with particular focus on Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.
The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), a global network working to advance emerging market entrepreneurship, recently partnered with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to support a set of partnerships explicitly designed to help small and growing businesses (SGBs) improve their own approaches to collecting and using data on gender to increase their impact. These projects were more than an exercise in changing perspectives. Instead, we collectively and purposefully attempted to “flip the script” toward empowering business owners and managers with the agency and tools to harness their data – not for the researcher’s benefit, but for their own business and community development.
In South Africa, the second largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa in 2019, SGBs contribute to the economy by increasing employment and job creation opportunities to many people who would not be generally employed by the larger corporations.