The Digital Finance team has initiated an annual effort to identify models or examples of digital finance support at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that demonstrate development outcomes catalyzed by digital finance, improved service delivery, and lessons learned for replication and scale. In partnership with USAID’s Digital Finance (DFS) Team, Headlight co-implemented a Positive Deviance evaluative effort on the team’s work with USAID/Ethiopia. The Support for Market Growth with USAID/Ethiopia case study is one of the bright spots identified and evaluated in 2020, and the following narrative details the full USAID/Washington – USAID/Ethiopia engagement from an initial digital agriculture assessment conducted by the Digital Development for Feed the Future (D2FTF) team to the finalization of the Activity design for the Market Systems for Growth (MS4G) activity. This report provides an overview of the methods, context, barriers and enablers, and milestones that provide a verified pathway for successful Mission engagement to promote a country’s sustainable growth, support the objectives of the USAID Digital Strategy, and help catalyze a Mission’s development outcomes.
Headlight is always excited to help clients identify and share exemplary work in development grounded in evidence and conducts various fit-for-purpose evaluative case studies using rigorous methods, in addition to the firm’s more expansive work in Collaborating, Learning, Adapting, Monitoring, and Evaluation (CLAME).