Integrating Food Security and the Value Chain Approach

  • Partner: United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
  • Publication Type: Brief
  • Date: March 2012

Food security is a common issue across many contexts where a value chain approach is employed. This briefing paper identifies challenges, solutions and emerging good practices in using the value chain approach to improve food security. It focuses on the synergies where the value chain approach can contribute towards food security objectives and vice versa.

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Pathways Out of Poverty: Tools for Value Chain Development Practitioners

  • Partner: ACDI/VOCA and United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
  • Publication Type: Toolkit
  • Date: January 2012

This toolkit equips value chain development programmers with a set of tools that can be used for situation assessments, value chain selection and value chain analysis. The document presents an overview of each tool listed, including a brief description of its relevance to reaching the very poor in the context of a value chain development program. It also presents brief examples of how each tool can be applied and used to inform programming decisions.

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Pathways out of Poverty Case Study: Savings Groups on the Pathway to Graduation: PSNP Plus in Ethiopia

  • Partner: ACDI/VOCA, United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
  • Publication Type: Case Study
  • Date: January 2012

This is one in a series of USAID-commissioned case studies that examined interventions and approaches to creating pathways out of poverty that “pushed” the very poor towards productive engagement in markets and/or “pulled” the poor into markets. This case study looks at how the PSNP Plus project in Ethiopia piloted interventions to sustainably graduate households from dependence on cash and food transfers.

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Pathways Out of Poverty: Applying Key Principles of the Value Chain Approach to Reach the Very Poor

  • Partner: United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
  • Publication Type: Report
  • Date: December 2011

This discussion paper provides guidance on how value chain and market development core principles can be adopted when working directly with the very poor. This paper is applicable to initiatives aiming to ‘reach down’ further and include the very poor in—or graduate the very poor more intentionally into—economic growth interventions, thereby creating a “pathway out of poverty.”

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Beyond Financial Services: Combining Savings Groups with Agricultural Marketing in Tanzania

  • Partner: Aga Khan Foundation (AKF)
  • Publication Type: Case Study
  • Date: April 2011

This case study reviews a chickpea production and marketing project implemented by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in the Mwanza region of northern Tanzania. The project facilitated agricultural production and marketing support to savings groups comprised of chickpea farmers. This document presents the preliminary findings of the project in an effort to explore the sustainability and replicability of this integrated model.

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Beyond Financial Services: A Synthesis of Studies on the Integration of Savings Groups and Other Developmental Activities

  • Partner: Aga Khan Foundation (AKF)
  • Publication Type: Case Study
  • Date: April 2011

This document summarizes the findings of a Learning Initiative carried out by Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) with support from the MasterCard Foundation, to study the integration of Savings Groups (SGs) and other developmental activities. It looked at nine projects that integrated SGs with other activities such as linkages to agricultural input and output markets, health education, and marketing of social products (i.e. solar lamps).

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