Top Development Stories of 2025: TechnoServe’s Most Impactful Moments
Our five most-read stories from 2025 illustrate just a few of the ways that TechnoServe has helped women and men in Africa, Asia, and Latin America overcome obstacles to build brighter futures.
This year, TechnoServe worked with thousands of small-scale farmers and entrepreneurs to overcome challenges, find creative solutions, and build lasting change for themselves, their families, and their broader communities. Check out our five most-read stories of 2025, then explore other content on the TechnoServe blog.
5. How Women Entrepreneurs in India Are Driving Sustainable Change (February 28, 2025)
Women play a pivotal role in shaping their communities and economies, demonstrating ingenuity and resilience in the face of challenges. Often, this starts with identifying a need and finding a creative solution—whether it’s maximizing resources, building a business, or improving agricultural practices. This inherent drive to create and contribute has deep roots.
In honor of International Women’s Day, we celebrated three women entrepreneurs in India who participated in TechnoServe’s Greenr Sustainability Accelerator Program, supported by the IKEA Foundation and Visa Foundation. These women learned and applied critical skills that boosted their businesses and created pathways for others to succeed.
4. Food Fortification: The Key to Tackling Malnutrition at Scale (April 30, 2025)
In a world where nearly 733 million people face hunger and three billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, food fortification is a critical tool to improve global nutrition. TechnoServe recognizes food fortification as essential for addressing malnutrition at scale.
Food fortification involves enriching staple foods with essential micronutrients, such as vitamins and minerals. By increasing the nutrient density of staple foods, fortification has become a critical global approach to enhancing population-wide nutrition and health.
Food fortification is the process of deliberately increasing the content of essential micronutrients, such as vitamins, minerals, and other critical nutrients, in staple foods. This strategic approach addresses nutritional gaps and improves public health by enhancing the nutritional value of commonly consumed foods without significantly altering their taste, texture, or cost.
3. Sustainable Coffee Supply Chains: How Technology is Helping Kenyan Cooperatives Navigate the EU Deforestation Regulation (January 24, 2025)
The European Union Deforestation Regulation, commonly called EUDR, is a law that aims to prevent products associated with deforestation and forest degradation from entering the European market.
EUDR requires companies to ensure that products containing cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soy, and timber are sourced from land that hasn’t been deforested after 2020. In Kenya, EUDR provides coffee cooperatives with the opportunity to demonstrate that their coffee was grown without deforestation. It also gives customers confidence that their coffee meets an important standard that protects forests.
However, this also means that farmer organizations like the New Murarandia Farmers’ Cooperative Society will need to collect data at an unprecedented scale. Without this data, the cooperative will not be able to sell its crop to coffee roasters and retailers in Europe, reducing farmers’ incomes and livelihoods.
2. Understanding Food Systems: What You Need to Know (January 17, 2025)
Food systems are networks that connect all processes involved in feeding the global population. From agricultural production to consumption, the food system plays a pivotal role in global sustainability, food security, and economic development. Around the world, an estimated 4.5 billion people rely on food systems for their livelihoods.
Understanding and strengthening food systems is critical as challenges like climate change, food waste, malnutrition, and inefficiencies in supply chains grow.
A healthy, functioning food system is essential for ensuring food security, which is defined as the ability of all people to access sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. Food production may falter without sustainable practices. This leads to food shortages and rising prices, which disproportionately affect vulnerable communities. In 2023, 733 million people—one in eleven globally—struggled with hunger.
- Understanding Food Insecurity: Causes, Impact, and Solutions (February 21, 2025)
What is food insecurity, and what can we do to combat it? Food insecurity occurs when individuals do not have consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life, as defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization.
There are four dimensions to consider:
- Physical availability of food
- Economic and physical access to food
- Food utilization by the body
- Stability of the other three dimensions over time
Food shortages are often caused by specific crises like natural disasters or war, but food insecurity can persist in both the short and long term, depending on economic conditions, infrastructure, and social policies. Other key drivers for food security include poor health status, low income, and discrimination.
