Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation is a USAID program, launched in 2012, that builds partnerships with agribusinesses in emerging markets to help them sell new products and services to smallholder farmers, who represent a potential market of more than 500 million customers worldwide.

For nearly a decade, Partnering for Innovation has partnered with 75 businesses in 24 countries, helping to commercialize 145 technologies and management practices. More than 1.7 million smallholder farmers have purchased $133 million worth of these products and services to date, enabling them to boost farm production, increase incomes, reinvest in their businesses and strengthen food security.

This guide draws on key lessons from Partnering for Innovation’s decade-long collaboration with agribusinesses in emerging markets. We are sharing these lessons in this easy-to-use guide structured in seven steps. Partnering for Innovation was explicitly designed to make it easy for private sector businesses to receive and manage USAID funds to achieve mutually beneficial development goals. We do this using:

• A simplified, targeted application process
• A cocreation and codesign process to develop goals and targets
• Performance-based funding mechanisms
• Minimized reporting requirements

This guide is designed for development practitioners and others who wish to work with the private sector to achieve development goals. This can include bilateral and multilateral government donors who are fostering the resilience of the whole market system, nongovernmental organizations that are building the capacity of private sector stakeholders and investors who have added social impact to their portfolio return indicators.

Partnering directly with private sector businesses is an excellent way to build sustainable access to agricultural technologies and markets for smallholder farmers. Smallholder farmers need improved inputs, access to finance that suits the agricultural cycle, better ways to store their harvested goods and access to reliable markets. Agricultural businesses have the products and services that smallholder farmers need to make farming productive and profitable, and can provide markets for farmers’ goods. By taking an investment approach to engagement with private sector businesses, it is possible to achieve development goals for smallholder farmers while building the long-term capacity of individual businesses and the resilience of the market system as a whole.

For a partnership to be successful, business objectives must align with investors’ development goals. Businesses also need the flexibility and ownership to create strategies that work for them. Partnering for Innovation has developed an approach to collaborate with businesses to develop formal partnership agreements that meet both business and development objectives.