Toolkit: Commodity value chain development projects

Strong links to markets for poor rural producers are essential to increasing agricultural income, generating economic growth in rural areas and reducing hunger and poverty. Every product that is sold locally, nationally or internationally is often part of an agricultural value chain (VC). From a development perspective, VCs are one of the instruments through which market forces can be harnessed to benefit poor rural women and men – not just producers, but wage earners, service providers and others.

This toolkit offers guidance to help practitioners address the analysis and mapping of VCs during the design of country strategies and the design and implementation of projects/programmes. These include:

• Teaser: provides an overview of the issues and the challenges, benefits and opportunities in VC projects
• How to design commodity value chain development projects - provides a practical introduction to basic concepts, identify key issues and provide references to the most relevant literature.
• How to do Public-Private-Producer Partnerships (4Ps) in Agricultural Value Chains - provides guidance for project design teams on how to design a 4P component and how to support the implementation of 4Ps within IFAD-funded projects.
• How to do climate change risk assessments in value chain projects - provides guidance on the types of issues that project design teams might consider in order to manage climate risks in value chain projects.
• How to do livestock value chain analysis and project development - focuses on livestock-specific issues and examples.
• How to monitor progress in value chain projects – provides guidance on monitoring and evaluation and some of the key indicators that could be used
• Lessons learned in designing commodity value chain development projects
• Scaling up note: A value chain development approach to scale up results in agriculture