Samriddhi

Samriddhi Project Document
To consolidate the achievements of Samriddhi, a continuous process of experience
capitalisation and knowledge sharing will be organised. Several tools developed and
experiences capitalised under LEAF and SAAKTI have already been published, raising interest
in the development community. For the next phase, this process will be continued.
Pro-poor orientation
Although LEAF and SAAKTI have been able to significantly contribute to improved living
conditions of the poor, more efforts will be made for their inclusion. Experiences shown however
that it is extremely difficult to reach the poorest level of the society, i.e. the bottom 10% without
specifically targeted interventions like safety net support or asset transfer. Since Samriddhi will
not include this type of interventions, it will not be able to specifically target the economic
development of this segment of the population. Nevertheless, through increasing the social
responsibility of communities, local governments and enterprises, these poor households can
eventually profit from the project interventions.
This also implies to better target value chain interventions in terms of sector and geographic
location. To achieve this, the eight existing value chains have been ranked following twelve
criteria in order to assess their economic viability together with their poverty orientation.
Additionally, new value chains were selected according to the same criteria. In an iterative
process, the eleven most poverty relevant value chains that have a significant potential to bring
income and employment opportunities to the poor and extreme poor in the intervention areas
have been selected for further analysis, which will build the basis for the intervention design.
Six existing value chains have been selected for scaling up in existing and new regions
(medicinal plants, milk, vegetables, fruit, fish and poultry). Those value chains showed very
promising progress in the last phase, reaching a total of nearly 100,000 households. In the
medicinal plants value chain, many poor and extreme poor households are involved, since no
initial investments are needed; the potentials for more value addition at producer level and
increased outreach are high. The milk value chain will be continued and consolidated in Bogra
and Rangpur region, where it has worked well in including poor and extreme poor; the potential
to further improve the value chain performance is high. Both, fruit and vegetables value chains
show high numbers of beneficiaries whereof, however, only a limited number are poor or
extreme poor. Nevertheless, through improved production technologies and chain performance,
inclusiveness can further be improved. Fish has been selected as value chain due to the high
demand of fish and its potential to include poor and extreme poor through the use of public
ponds. Back yard poultry (chicken) also offers a high potential for poor and extreme poor, since
they can raise the chicken on their homestead land. However, for pond fish and chicken, a more
comprehensive analysis has to be performed. Because of its limited potential to scale up, it has
been decided that the spices value chain will be phased out.
Apart from the existing value chains, five new value chains will be introduced, namely beef,
goat, cotton craft, jute craft, and plant craft. Cotton craft covers mainly tailoring, embroidery,
handloom, etc., whereas plant craft covers work with raw materials being bamboo, grass, leafs,
etc. The latter three value chains show a high potential of including women as well as poor and
extreme poor since they usually don’t need any initial investments with raw materials often
provided by the traders nor any land. LEAF already gathered experience in working with
handicrafts, using a value chain approach. Beef and goat value chains are attractive because
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