Webinar Slides: The Misunderstood Middle: The Role of Intermediate Firms and Investors in Support of Conservation Enterprises

Findings from USAID's 20-year retrospective of conservation enterprises pointed to the importance of intermediate firms to scale conservation outcomes. Programs supporting conservation enterprises seem to evolve from providing support to individual or community-run enterprises to helping to establish “intermediate firms”— businesses in the supply chain that provide services such as aggregation, value addition, and market linkages for products and services from many communities. Intermediary firms are key to bringing community benefits to scale, and, in turn, scaling changes in behaviors and reducing threats to biodiversity. This webinar featured an interview with two experts in conservation enterprises—Ann Koontz from Relief International, and Dietmar Stoian from the World Agroforestry Centre—and a group discussion on what information USAID staff need to better support intermediate firms.