Mennonite Economic Development Associates

MEDA is an international economic development organization that ‘creates business solutions to poverty’. MEDA aims to contribute to the sustainable development goal of poverty elimination by creating or sustaining decent work opportunities for half a million people, especially women and youth, by 2030 .

For over 70 years, MEDA has promoted the belief that all people deserve the opportunity to earn a livelihood and that entrepreneurship is a powerful driver on the path to alleviate poverty.

MEDA is focusing efforts on agri-food market systems in the Global South. This strategic direction is guided by the belief that agricultural development is a powerful tool to stop extreme poverty, boost prosperity and ensure food security for millions of households. Agri-business is a priority area and MEDA has contributed innovations and relevant solutions for small- and medium-sized enterprises for decades.

MEDA’s mandate is to invest in rural populations in the Global South and enable inclusive and sustainable transformation of agri-food market systems.

MEDA also recognizes that the road to poverty elimination is not straight nor simple. There are many contributing factors that must be considered and or addressed in order to bring about sustainable change. MEDA also works to alleviate the impacts of inequality, climate change, and exclusion from markets in the effort to create sustainable, positive change in the lives of our clients.

MEDA has identified four strategic pillars to guide the ways of working with partners within our countries and sectors of operations. They are summarize by the four Ps, namely:

i. Programming: MEDA designs and implements initiatives that are focused on women and youth in agri-food systems with the goal of creating decent work opportunities.

ii. Processes: MEDA continues to develop long-term programming and partnerships in focused-regions and make disciplined decisions.

iii. Proof of Performance: MEDA continues to put our clients first, ensuring that metrics help them make better decisions and remain accountable to stakeholders.

iv. Positioning: MEDA continues to learn from our successes and failures and share our learnings in innovative finance, agri-food systems, and private sector engagement.

Specifically, MEDA pursues systems-level change by broadening our scope beyond immediate project-bound work to sustainable alliances that achieve impact at scale. MEDA is partnering with global development agents, governments and sector stakeholders in the countries of

operations to advance equality and help transcend poverty through decent work opportunities.

MEDA works to address the structures that trap people in poverty using a market systems approach. Drawing on our areas of technical expertise, we work to create an enduring foundation for income and community prosperity through decent work opportunities.

MEDA embraces a shared voice committed to empowering the Global South. This is reflected in MEDA’s communication, program development, implementation, evaluation, operations, philanthropy, and governance. MEDA believes that success is sustained when it is based on the local context. Through this shift in our way of working, we continue to build conditions for self-reliance and economic freedom wherever we work.

Further, to achieve our ambitious agenda, MEDA’s work aligns with six of the Sustainable Development Goals, namely:

i. SDG 1: No Poverty
ii. SDG 2: No hunger
iii. SDG 5: Gender Equality
iv. SDG 8: Decent work and economic growth
v. SDG 13: Climate Action
vi. SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals

In this regard, MEDA is committed to the following cross-cutting themes:

• Anti-racism, gender equality and social inclusion

• Innovation and technology adoption

• Partnerships and contextual knowledge

• Environmental sustainability and climate action

MEDA has strong financial, technical and management capabilities to design and implement interventions, which are aligned with its strategic goal of creating decent work opportunities for women and youth. Specifically, MEDA has five technical units:

1. Market systems
2. Impact Investing
3. Financial Inclusion
4. Gender Equality and Social Inclusion
5. Environment and Climate Change

In addition to these technical competencies, MEDA has dedicated Monitoring and Impact Measurement Department that gathers data to understand whether our interventions are achieving the results we expected, what can we learn from them and which approaches need to be refined to help our clients reach their true potential.

With seven decades of operation, the MEDA team has consistently overcome relevant development challenges with creative ideas, new concepts, and thoughtful, sustainable programming and products.

MEDA has developed unique investment tools and systems such as impact investing, market systems approaches and blended finance; and continues to be a leader in the social impact financial solutions.

MEDA has directly impacted over 4.5 million individuals through our agri-business projects since 1953. This includes benefitting an estimated 2.8 million women — (62%) of the total.

Specifically, in the decade (2010-2020) alone, MEDA has implemented 122 initiatives in 50 countries, benefitting 2 million clients (directly) including women and youth.

In all of these initiatives MEDA has employed our technical framework to realize impactful and sustainable agriculture and agri-business solutions.

Over this period, we have also collaborated with over 9600 public, civil-society, private and international partners.

Programming Results over the years

i. Access to financial literacy and Inclusion
In a typical MEDA agri-business project that also includes financial literacy and inclusion, there is a 73% increase in people with access to appropriate financial tools.

ii. Increased productivity
The median rate of increase for crop productivity is 66% with MEDA projects

iii. Sustainable Livelihoods
At least 127million jobs have been created directly from MEDA projects in the past 50 years3

What’s Next?
In the years leading up to 2025, which closes our current strategic period, MEDA is focused on the making significant strides in the following areas relating to the 4 strategic Pillars.

1) Positioning

Enhanced Corporate Visibility
• Engaging new donors and partners to join agri-food market systems development.
• Influencing agri-food policy.
• Developing partnerships that boost brand visibility.

Embedded Innovation
• Proactively engaging Global South partners to pursue innovative, appropriate solutions to poverty
• Capturing improvements in impact, scale, and efficiency of client enterprises.
• Becoming thought leaders in our niche area by sharing relevant and useful insights and create impact in agri-food market systems

2) Programming

Sharper Focus
• Become a recognized leader in improving decent work in agri-food market systems.
• Gain expertise in high value crop market systems of focus countries.

Systems Level Impact
• Conduct rigorous agri-food market systems assessments guide our work.
• Measure systems level change.
• Secure longer-term partnerships with donors and stakeholders.

Alignment of Impact Investment
• Global staff, donors, partners, and clients share impact investing knowledge and convene stakeholders for system level impacts.
• Prioritize capital for agri-food market systems where we work.

Resource Diversification
• Broaden our donor base.
• Motivate institutional donors to make longer-term commitments for systems level change.