"While the world has made huge economic gains over the past 50 years, this progress has been highly uneven. This is particularly acute in the agriculture sector, with many of the 500 million smallholder farmers around the world living on meager incomes and facing high levels of economic insecurity.

Despite some recent innovations and advances in including smallholders as market players, there have been few cases where truly widespread, market-level, transformative change towards inclusion has been achieved.

In this report, we explore the role of different kinds of capital in bending the arc of agricultural market development towards inclusive growth. We pay particular attention to how impact-focused players deploying capital that is flexible in terms of risk-return expectations can best deploy it in order to catalyze large-scale transformations towards inclusion."

"Adapting from the Ground Up draws upon a growing body of research and projects on private sector adaptation. It shares examples from case studies of interventions in Cambodia, Nicaragua, Tajikistan, and Zimbabwe, which successfully catalyzed MSE investment in climate adaptation measures in the agriculture sector. The report also presents a number of shorter case studies from projects and initiatives in Benin, Cook Islands, Ethiopia, Honduras, India, Namibia, Rwanda, and Tanzania. The report also describes the different elements that policymakers need to take into account when designing policies and interventions to catalyze MSE investment in adaptation."

"Mercy Corps’ AgriFin Accelerate Program (AFA) is a $25 million, six-year initiative funded by the MasterCard Foundation to support private sector actors to develop, prototype and scale digitally-enabled services for smallholder farmers across Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. AFA is intended to help partner banks, mobile network operators, agribusinesses and technology companies scale high impact services for at least one million farmers, driving 50% increases in smallholder income and productivity, while working to support all market actors to expand services to farmers through shared learning...In June 2018, AFA contracted the Dalberg Group to assess learnings across these engagements and conduct supplementary research on these youth pathways. The goal of this exercise was to support the development of AFA partners and to inform wider ecosystem growth through public learning."

"The agribusiness incubator in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India is the result of a partnership between the Indian government and an international crop-research organization that is a member of CGIAR, a global partnership of organizations seeking a food-secure future. As the incubator has developed, it has become relatively independent of its founders, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the Indian government’s Department of Science and Technology. From supporting small businesses that can bring new agricultural research and technology to market, ABI has become an incubator of incubators, and is now helping African incubators follow its model."

"This research was commissioned as a result of growing interest in the topic of youth-centred Agripreneurship and had the objective to identify the key actors particularly within Academia, Non-Government Organisations and the non-profit sector to help young unemployed, or underemployed, graduates in Africa, or other developing economies, to enter into entrepreneurship in agriculture or agribusiness."

"In recent years, there has been growing interest and funding dedicated to technical assistance (TA) designed to strengthen the commercial and development impact of businesses in developing markets. However, relatively little is known about the nature and effectiveness of these initiatives. To help address that knowledge gap, this paper focuses on efforts by development finance institutions (DFIs) to provide technical assistance to agribusinesses, which—while comprising only a small share of overall DFI investment portfolios—receive 30% of all TA."

"A youth-oriented approach involves asking practical questions to develop tailored services for youth in the agribusiness sector. 2SCALE has been experimenting with various options to support young producers and entrepreneurs. Making agriculture interesting to youth requires making it attractive and remunerative by having access to land, finance and technologies in order to modernize. Besides production another alternative for youth inclusion was explored: specialized service delivery to value chain actors. This paper provides examples of how 2SCALE tackled youth inclusion in its partnerships."

"This case study reviewed social enterprises operating in the agriculture and health sectors in Kenya by conducting a desk-based literature review, interviews and a workshop with social enterprises and support organisations in Nairobi, which is currently seen as a hub of social enterprise activity in Africa. The case study considers how the lack of a widely-accepted social enterprise definition influences activity in Kenya, identifies niches within which agriculture and health sector social enterprises are operating and summarises some key findings from discussions with key informants."