The Value Chain Approach to rural agricultural development. Understanding the principal determinants of pro-poor outcomes

  • This paper seeks to better understand the determinants of pro-poor outcomes in value chain projects. It is motivated by a desire to examine scepticism regarding the widespread use of value chain projects as poverty-alleviation tools. The thesis is guided by the following questions i.Can value chain approaches to rural development benefit the poor in a direct manner? ii.Under what circumstances can value chain approaches to rural development achieve the most substantive and significant pro-poor outcomes? In particular, the paper focuses on asset-poor agricultural producers (including farmers), which are referred to as poor producers for the sake of brevity. As such, pro-poor outcomes refer to beneficial outcomes for asset-poor agricultural producers. To address these two questions, the paper is divide d into three chapters. Chapter one explores the concept of the value chain. Through this it highlights an increasing emphasis on value chain projects among donor organisations, as well as a lack of thorough monitoring and evaluations of these projects. Chapter two develops an understanding of pro-poor outcomes in value chain projects. This understanding is developed in a three-stage process. First, a review of existing academic literature, donor documents, and independent evaluations of value chain projects is conducted (Section 2.1). The aim of the review is to develop an understanding of value chain participation, particularly the terms by which participation can occur. ii Second, the paper identifies ten key factors affecting the ability of poor producers to participate in and directly benefit from value chai ns (Section 2.2). They are: labour intensity; asset specificity; commodity differentiation; long-run price stability; perishability; time-horizon and frequency of benefits; vertical coordination; horizontal coordination; vertical integration by producers’ associations; and lead firm. Third, the paper synthesises these findings into a testable analytical typology consisting of six key determinants of pro-poor outcomes. These are: labour intensity; specificity; resilience; perishability; income smoothing; and governance of linkages. This analytical typology is intended to serve as a conceptual frame work on which value chain selection, design, and implementation may be structured. The typology is presented in terms of the likelihood that value chains will achieve pro-poor outcomes (Section 2.3). This typology serves as the paper’s principal output, and can be both applied to, and tested using future value chain projects. Chapter three applies the typology to an assortment of IFAD’s on-going value chain projects. The aim of this section is to offer an ex ample of how the typology could be applied in practice (Section 3.2). This is done to guide future research on pro-poor outcomes in value chain interventions. Two projects are given particular attention. These two cases exemplify how the typology can be applied to value chain project designs to create falsifiable hypotheses on whether the projects will achieve pro-poor outcomes. The intention is that future projects will utilize similar hypotheses to test the typology’s explanatory power (for a proposed methodology, see Appendix). In the conclusion, the paper offers recommendations for future research.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Master's Thesis
Language:English
Author(s):Nicholas Ross, Jonathan West
Referee:Arntraud Hartmann
Publisher:Hertie School of Governance
Place of Publisher:Berlin
Hertie Collections (Serial Number):Hertie School Student Paper Series (09/2013)
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
Granting Institution:Hertie School
Thesis date:2013/01/10
Number pages:102
Release Date:2017/02/03
Confidentiality:0
Licence of document (German):CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
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