USAID Learning Event session highlight: Integrating the very poor into value chains

As research to date suggests, and as project implementers can attest, the ‘poorest of the poor’ rarely benefit from value chain development initiatives as a result of constraints that preclude them from participating in project activities as well as from attracting the attention of private-sector actors. Recently, USAID has hosted an e-Consultation, commissioned case studies, and developed several other resources to improve the capacity of value chain development programs to integrate the very poor into market opportunities (Learn more »). Building on this work, USAID will be hosting a session on “Reaching the Very Poor Through Value Chain Development” at the upcoming two-day learning event: Meeting the Challenges of Value Chain Development. 

The highly participatory session will include presentations and panel discussions from practitioners and donors, including Shari Berenbach, head of USAID’s Microenterprise Development office, and Jason Wolfe, Senior Household Economic Strengthening Advisor with USAID's Office of HIV/AIDS. The session will provoke discussion on the advantages, challenges, and means to reach the very poor through a value chain approach and share examples of this in practice – illustrating how goals of integrating the very poor and stimulating economic growth can be mutually supportive. 

Please join us February 7-8 to contribute your ideas on how poverty affects actors’ participation in markets, as well as the ways in which engaging the very poor can strengthen (not weaken) a market system.  For more information on this learning event, please visit the event page. 

About the Event

Meeting the Challenges of Value Chain Development: A Learning Event is being held to bring the donor, practitioner and research communities together to disseminate significant learning that has taken place as well as to generate discussion and share ideas on how to continue the learning going forward. Workshops will include topics such as facilitating sustainable change, integrating food security and nutrition, engaging the private sector, learning and evaluating with dynamic systems, financing the value chain, and reaching the very poor.

• Value Chain Finance
• Value Chain Governance
• Value Chains
• Vulnerable
• Very Poor
• Design
• Cooperatives
• Households
• Social Enterprises
• Analysis
• Value Chain Mapping
• Value Chain Development