FIELD Support LWA Award Quarterly Report April 1- June 30, 2010

The agreement encompasses a core Leader award and a mechanism for USAID missions to issue Associate Awards. The purpose of the Leader award is to advance the frontiers of practical knowledge in relation to microfinance, microenterprise development, and sustainable rural livelihoods. FIELD-Support's consortium includes nine core partners and 17 resource organizations. The Leader implements activities that seed innovation, demonstrate better practices, document results, and disseminate findings that will advance the global state-of-the-practice. These activities include Pilot Activities, Design/Assessments for USAID Missions and Operating Units, and Strategic Learning Initiatives (SLIs). In the third quarter of FY2010, FIELD-Support activities included nine Associate Awards, eight pilot activities, eight SLIs, and three design/assessments that were conducted or launched for various USAID Missions. The Leader staff at AED continued to monitor progress of this broad range of FIELD-Support activities, providing technical support when needed, reviewing and processing payments, and ensuring contractual and financial compliance. The FIELD-Support team at AED is pleased to present this quarterly report highlighting the LWA's key accomplishments for the quarter ending June 30, 2010. The report highlights the Leader activities, which continue to operate on track. The figure below shows each Core partner plus some strategic Resource partners' activity levels as they approach the end of this fiscal year. The Leader activities include Pilot Activities, which are implemented by the Core partners and Resource organizations. One of the Pilot Activities is the Microfinance Energy Links project, initiated by ACCION International and its Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI) in October 2007. The project focuses on developing distribution channels for the sale of inexpensive solar lamps to people living at the bottom of the pyramid in Uganda and Mali. During this quarter, program activities per energy product and country are as follows: Solar Lighting in Uganda and Mali. Barefoot Power, the three-year partner and supplier of solar lanterns, recently won multiple product awards at the Lighting Africa conference held in Nairobi, Kenya. The first shipment of solar devices sold in less than six weeks in Mali, demonstrating to local partners that the market is ready and responsive to solar products. The FIELD-Support team has provided senior-level oversight for all of the Leader activities and Associate Awards, contributing to their technical design, implementation, and ensuring quality. The team has also coordinated day-to-day communications with the Core and Resource organizations and assisted with the administration of this complex contractual mechanism.