Under What Conditions Are Value Chains Effective Tools for Pro Poor Development?
Understanding the benefits, costs, and risks when connecting small scale producers to formal markets is critical to supporting informed decision making by companies, farmers, NGOs, and donors about investing in supply chain opportunities. Key questions include: Who are the rural poor? Under what conditions do they benefit? What are implications of these lessons for our strategies in setting up “pro-development” value chains? What do we most need to understand next? This Executive Summary, and the longer paper it reflects, seek to inform these questions from not only a review of literature, but also from experience with a cluster of value chain projects by development organizations and businesses in Africa and Latin America.
Author: Sustainable Food Lab. January 2011
