Support to Business Organisations and their Access to Markets (BOAM)

The Value Chain Development Approach

The cornerstone of the whole approach is to focus on the critical constraints and opportunities that hold back the growth of sub sector and design interventions that would benefit all actors in the chain (not only farmers’ organisations) and have a potential to become viable solutions to be offered by the local service providers.

The programme will first identify agricultural products / commodities in order to specialise as a programme on selected value chains. Therefore activities will begin with contacting the producers in groups or individually, and discussing the challenges they experience with the specific product / commodity. Where there are no producer groups, fieldwork shall begin with initiating group formation and the identification of other stakeholders, such as service providers and processors involved of the respective value chain. The nature of the production patterns of the commodities determines the geographical outreach, which could well point beyond the defined programme regions.
 

Selection criteria for value chain identification  [top]

Opportunities in the regions were identified based on the potential sub sectors that meet a number of criteria. During the identification mission, a number of criteria were proposed for selection of potential commodities. These were:

The set of criteria comprised the following:

• Smallholder based production

• Percentage of production sold

• Possibilities for chain production

• Enhanced group activities

• High added value

• High market value

• Good marketing opportunities (local and /or export)

• Options for further innovations

• Particular gender concerns

• Support by government policies

• Social acceptance

Though these criteria are very well thought-out and encompassing, they are numerous, and it is difficult to test all of them against each commodity line. During the formulation mission, "attractiveness matrices" were used to shortlist and rank some of the potential commodities. Two criteria were discussed in the mini workshops and they proved to be a good yardstick. These were first, potential market opportunity (evidence of unmet demand, be it national, regional or international), and second, outreach to smallholder farmers in the regions (potential to affect a large number of beneficiaries). The short listing results were further discussed and validated during the subsequent regional workshops.

Every value chain supported by BOAM  has been analyzed in detail, along the following steps:

• Stakeholder Analysis to identify more precisely the existing players in the chains, including geographical mapping

• Market Studies (where necessary) to quantify the market potential (i.e. local demand, the regional market, export possibilities)

• SWOT-Analysis of the chain to identify bottlenecks

• Development of a support strategy for the chain and identification of BOAM Activities to support the private sector in the chain.

Support strategy  [top]

The support strategies could contain a number of activities, ranging from support to reform laws and policies, to capacity building of farmers organizations through training in farming as a businesses and organizational development. In a nutshell, the private sector actors are empowered to actively participate in the market and the public sector is supported to create an enabling environment for the selected value chains.

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