Implementation

On March 11, 2012, professors Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson published a study on "Savings Constraints and Microenterprise Development: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya" which was conducted in 2006, 2007, and 2008 and funded by The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Sampling was done in three waves with a total of 200 people. Dupas and Robinson worked with the Financial Services Association, a village bank in the market town of Bumala between Nairobi and Kampala, in order to offer savings accounts to randomly selected microenterpreneurs. These savings accounts did not pay interest, but clients were charged for withdrawals. The researchers analyzed savings account usage, which was recorded daily in logbooks over the period of several months. The researchers found that women benefited from these accounts and invested more in their businesses than men. Additionally, there was not a very high uptake of savings accounts, which could be attributed to people's mistrust of village banks. To learn more, please refer to the following post by David Roodman called “First Randomized Trial of Microsavings."

In October of 2011, economists Lasse Brune, Dean Yang, Xavier Giné and Jessica Goldberg published a new study on commitment savings. This study was conducted with the help from the formal bank Opportunity International Bank of Malawi. This study supports some of the earlier findings from a study by professors Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson and provides interesting additional information. This study focused on male tobacco farmers, who received loans from the Opportunity International Bank of Malawi as part of a 10-15 member group. As David Roodman pointed out in his blog post, “this study was designed to shed light on why commitment savings accounts help people, by measuring impacts on intermediate variables.”

Development projects have been seeking to positively influence complex systems, such as farming systems, small business systems, governance systems, and value chain systems since the advent of international development as a field of practice. Working with these large systems has always been a challenge, and has generated a large number of approaches and models designed to guide development projects. This presentation introduces a model for working in complex systems that has been developed by Human Systems Dynamics based on the science of complexity, and then demonstrates that model using the international development challenge of strengthening a rubber value chain in Indonesia.

An activity under STRIVE, the Afghanistan Secure Futures (ASF) initiative enhanced economic opportunities for youth in Afghanistan by targeting youth apprentices. The program had two key components: increase the number and diversity of contracts for enterprises—primarily workshops in the construction sector—who employ youth apprentices, and improve working conditions and learning opportunities for those youth. The latter included a critical literacy training component as well as a workplace safety component.

Over the course of the 3 years, ASF reached 353 workshops and 1,080 youth apprentices, with approximately one-third of these receiving multiple ASF interventions. ASF’s role in supporting workshop owners—were awarded contracts totaling US$2.2 million–to secure contracts included: providing training; facilitating contacts between workshops and contractors; and connecting workshop owners to each other, facilitating the process of subcontracting, or joint bids by multiple workshops.

This STRIVE for Learning Activity Brief outlines the program's key approaches, methods, and outputs.

ASF was one of five country programs implemented under the STRIVE program, funded by the USAID Displaced Children and Orphans Fund, in close collaboration with the USAID Microenterprise Development office cooperative agreement. STRIVE is an Associate Award under the FIELD-Support LWA.

The value chain approach aims to achieve economic growth with poverty reduction, but there tends to be a poverty ‘frontier’ beyond which value chain development programs struggle to engage. This briefing paper presents some emerging guidance around how value chain development can explicitly ‘pull’ the very poor into markets in gainful ways. It highlights program design strategies, examples of adapting value chain development principles, the importance of appropriately sequencing program interventions, as well as some key challenges when working with the very poor.

As the development industry reflects on its “value chain” activity over the past five years, we have frequently considered innovative approaches and solutions to market linkage challenges. But what does it mean to “innovate”? Is it incredibly smart people coming up with creative solutions? Is it serendipity? How can a project team aspire to continually innovate in a value chain market challenge?

Design thinking is a systematic, flexible process to adapt and promote iterative solutions while maintaining alignment with a project’s strategic objectives. In the context of a market consolidation and aggregation problem in Ukrainian horticulture market, the presenter will share MEDA’s lessons applying design thinking to generate results. Nick Ramsing of MEDA discusses the analysis and diagnosis of the market problem, the strategic objective, and the iterative process to design, prototype, test, and implement market-driven solutions to link smallholder farmers to higher value markets.

This tool is intended to help donors, implementers and governments develop a strategy for prioritizing and implementing changes in value chains. It outlines a process for analyzing opportunities and constraints in the value chain, identifying underlying causes of those constraints, and determining changes needed to address them. This process results in a set of clearly defined program activities and roles for various stakeholders to implement them.

Creating sustainable changes in a dynamic system is an ambiguous and iterative process. This tool provides guidance and a process of mapping and understanding a change process for the actors and industries being targeted by a project. It is intended to assist market facilitators in their efforts to guide a sector from the current state towards a more desirable, sustainable future.