Samriddhi

Samriddhi Project Document
agencies, and access to marginal land. They support them in their economic activities by
facilitating access to financial or in-kind assets on a credit or profit sharing basis.
At the same time as giving emphasise to the establishment of community platforms, the project
will phase out its support to individual CBOs.
88% of the present cluster platforms are located at Ward level. There are nine Wards per Union,
each of which includes a similar number of households. In order to give them the critical mass to
play a role in local governance the community platform should remain at Ward level.
The networks of cluster platforms, which were seen as an entity that could play an important
role in local governance and for the process of economic development at local level, could
hardly be put in place.
Local enterprises - MSEs
Many CBOs have evolved into, or gave birth to, different models of MSEs. In some cases, the
CBOs have evolved as collective enterprises. In other cases, one member of the CBO has
developed its own enterprise and involved other members in his or her business. There are also
cases where members from different groups and the community have developed collective
enterprises, or where individual enterprises got connected to networks. Although CBOs and
MSEs are not the same “institution”, they sometimes can hardly be distinguished as they consist
of the same people.
Beside the community platforms, MSEs will represent the second pillar in the community that
will ensure the sustainability of the project’s interventions. Successful MSEs will increase
income and employment opportunities in the communities. Through sensitisation during their
capacity building as well as through the influence of the community platforms, the MSEs will
also enable the poor and extreme poor of the community to access these opportunities. In the
project’s vision, rural MSEs reach a degree of development and professionalism to engage in
high quality national and international markets to increase their income and create employment
opportunities for the poor and extreme poor. At the same time, other market actors appreciate a
strong value chain organisation and organised producers, and intensify their work with and
support to local MSEs.
Since the project will phase out its support to individual CBOs but continue its support to MSEs,
conceptual clarity has to be established about what will be seen as MSE. In this context, an
MSE will be defined as an entity that is constituted by a group of local people who develop a
business plan and engage in economic activities.
Service Providers
The provision of high quality services – mainly on agricultural knowledge, technology and
information as well as business management – to the rural producers is done by both private
service providers and public bodies, especially extension agencies. At the beginning, the LSPs
were mostly seen as advisory service providers in order to replace the technical assistance
provided by NGOs. However, they have evolved beyond this assumption. To enrich their
services, the majority of them provide besides pure advisory services also inputs at discount
prices to their clients and play an active role in linking them with market actors. Through this
embedded provision of inputs, input companies have a way to make quality inputs available in
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