On May 22, 2021, Morgan Mickle, technical specialist for Banyan Global’s Gender and Youth practices, was selected as one of four winners of the Society for International Development’s Washington Chapter (SID-W) Lightning Talks Contest. In the winning video submission titled “The Art of Cross-cutting in International Development: 5 Lessons for Taking it to the Next Level,” Mickle examines the question of whether development practitioners truly understand cross-cutting work and explores what it looks like in practice to help bridge the gap between policy and implementation. She offers five lessons for practitioners looking to make improvements in how to carry out cross-cutting work effectively. The video will be featured on the Main Stage of the SID-W 2021 Annual Conference from May 26-27, 2021.

At Banyan Global, Mickle integrates concepts related to gender equality, positive youth development, and social inclusion into a number of international development projects and activities. This includes Banyan Global’s gender and youth integration work on the five-year Feed the Future Ethiopia Value Chain Activity led by Fintrac. The activity contributes to the Government of Ethiopia’s objective to improve agricultural productivity and commercialization of smallholder farmers in four regions of the country. Banyan Global leads the project’s gender and youth integration work through a two-pronged approach that integrates women, men, and youth considerations across all targeted value chains and seeks to empower these groups.

Another example Mickle highlights in the video is Banyan Global’s work on the Improving Market Partnerships and Access to Commodities Together (IMPACT) Program led by Population Services International (PSI), which aims to improve the capacity of the Malagasy health system to ensure that quality pharmaceuticals and health commodities are available and accessible to all Malagasy people on a sustainable basis. Banyan Global leads the integration of gender and social inclusion into the design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation of the IMPACT program, using our signature gender integration framework. Banyan Global completed a gender analysis to identify key gender advances, constraints, inequalities, and opportunities and is implementing a gender action plan with specific recommendations on how the IMPACT program can contribute to greater gender equity, women’s empowerment, and social inclusion in the health commodities sector in Madagascar.