7 Resilience & inclusion: Recommendations
To encourage mobilization of private sector investment for food security agendas, donors should:
7.1 Support the digitization of agricultural value chains to provide a pathway to increased resilience and the financial inclusion of small-scale producers.
7.2 Encourage investment in digital communication and drone technology to close the face-to-face gap.
7.3 Respond but weaned businesses off grant funding by building their capacity development organizations. In the event of major shocks, they will need funding for immediate priorities such as payroll and rent.
7.4 Redesign initiatives to catalyse private investment for acute food insecurity that focus on smallholder farmer support.
7.5 Focus efforts on catalysing private investment into local agricultural processing and value addition.
7.6 Leverage blended financing to mobilize local financial institutional lending to processing and value addition SMEs.
7.7 Develop detailed guidance for programmes on best practices they can adopt to advance women’s economic empowerment beyond sex disaggregated target setting and data collection. All ICF programmes in the Commercial Agriculture Portfolio should have gender action plans developed.
7.8 Incentivize the mainstreaming of climate change, gender, and nutrition in programme design and, crucially, implementation; encourage programmes to set thematic objectives; and facilitate closer collaboration between technical and operational teams to support this.
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Impact of Covid-19 on agribusinesses for investors. [63 pages]
Executive summary [8 pages] draws out immediate lessons from the pandemic and also future opportunities to improve business resilience in the face of systemic threats that reduce transport and access to markets.
Watch the video
CASA Webinar 6: Rethinking Agribusiness Investments After Covid [59 minutes]
Or read: the one-page summary
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Updated June 2023
Summary of recommendations for donors