Samriddhi

Samriddhi Project Document
The main challenge for Samriddhi will be to consolidate the achievements of LEAF and SAAKTI
to make them sustainable and at the same time scale-up the successful interventions to
increase the outreach. The cluster platforms, which have been coordinating activities between
CBOs, have to be put in a better position to cover the interests of extreme poor and
disadvantaged groups. Thus, they will be encouraged to transform themselves into community
platforms, representing not only CBO members but also taking into account all and especially
the weak segments of the community. According to the project’s vision, the community platform
will play a crucial role in connecting the communities with the local government bodies.
Furthermore, services to MSEs have to be institutionalised in collaboration with public and
private organisations. The service providers associations (SPA) will take the lead role in this
regard. Their capacity will be strengthened to negotiate and organise capacity building and
procure updated knowledge and information, but also to more efficiently and effectively organise
the service transactions. At the same time, value chain actors need to become drivers for
development of their sub-sectors. The project will facilitate appropriate market actors to take the
necessary steps to upgrade their value chain leading to enhanced competitiveness of the
farmers’ products and better performance of the value chains.
To work towards sustainability, the project will adopt a more systemic view on the system of
rural producers and their markets. A number of crucial supporting functions for the rural MSEs
and value chains will be targeted, focusing on business development services. Besides
supporting functions, an enabling environment is crucial for value chain and market
development. Similarly, for social empowerment and inclusion of the poorest into the society, an
enabling and empowering environment is essential. An increased involvement of the
communities in local governance is necessary to achieve this. In order to make the system
inclusive and empowering, there is also a need of strong human and institutional competencies
of all actors.
The main approaches of Samriddhi are “Human and Institutional Development” (HID) and
“Making Markets Work for the Poor” (M4P). HID will help the community platforms to work
towards an empowering and enabling local environment and the MSEs and SPAs to take a
strong role in business development, outreach and inclusiveness. The M4P approach will be
directed to establish sustainable and inclusive market systems for the selected value chains.
Samriddhi will strengthen its focus on poverty and extreme poverty which includes more
targeted value chain interventions in terms of sector and geographic location. To achieve this, a
set of eleven value chains has been selected according to their potential and poverty
orientation. Besides the targeting of value chain interventions, an increased inclusion of the poor
and extreme poor in both social and economic activities will be achieved through sensitisation
and capacity building of community leaders, MSEs and SPAs. Besides that, gender
mainstreaming will contribute to the empowerment of women and improved situation of women
entrepreneurs. The mainstreaming of DRR will contribute to protect the assets that the target
households could establish with the support of the project.
At the community level, the project will deliver its support to the target households through the
community platforms. Each community platform will cover the geographical boundary of one
Ward. The project expects to organise community platforms covering around 700,000
households or roughly 3 million people. In addition 500,000 households outside the
geographical area of the project will benefit and, thus, the overall coverage of the project will be
Intercooperation Bangladesh
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