Pro-Poor Value Chain Development - Capacity.org

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• Business development
• Knowledge development and learning
• Service provider development
The first four chapters of this Volume discuss each of the intervention areas in more
detail.
Sector development (Chapter 1) is the process of creating better business
opportunities within an agricultural (sub) sector by implementing a number of
activities and processes that potentially benefit all value chain actors. A key element
in BOAM’s approach was the development of win-win relationships between the value
chain actors themselves as well as between these actors and their supporters and
influencers within the broader enabling environment.
Business development (Chapter 2) is about supporting specific actors within
the value chain. This often involves strengthening relationships between chain
actors, also referred to as business-to-business (B2B) development. In BOAM’s
practice, B2B development ensured that the opportunities created for a value chain
were transformed into concrete business deals and that, ultimately, smallholder
farmers were able to benefit from the improved market opportunities and enabling
environment created through broader sector development interventions.
The knowledge development and learning component is explained in Chapter 3.
Since value chain development is an innovative approach, it is important that
the learning processes associated with it are conducted in a systematic way and
that proven practices and lessons learnt are well documented and disseminated
within other BOAM value chains and elsewhere. As shown in Figure 0.2, knowledge
development and learning were at the centre of the BOAM approach and were
interlinked with the other key interventions areas for sector-wide learning and
upscaling.
Chapter 4 elaborates on the fourth component of the BOAM programme: service
provider development. This entailed establishing an Ethiopian community of
value chain service providers that would contribute to the further upgrading and
upscaling of the BOAM value chains without SNV support. This is crucial for overall
sustainability and the adoption of the approach within other subsectors or value
chains. In line with SNV’s strategic focus on ‘localisation’, BOAM ensured that the
capacity strengthening of business development service providers was an integral
part of its intervention approach, right from the launch of the Programme in 2005.
Chapter 5 reflects on BOAM’s practice from a more theoretical perspective. In
2010-11 the Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) of the Netherlands
Ministry of Foreign Affairs used the BOAM honey value chain as a case study for
an evaluation on capacity developement. The theoretical framework used in the
evaluation distinguished between five core capabilities (Baser and Morgan, 2008) of
organisations, networks and systems to analyse a number of systemic changes that
occurred within the honey value chain system as a result of BOAM’s interventions.
Chapter 6 contains the results of a joint study by researchers at the Centre for
International Development Issues (CIDIN) of Radboud University in Nijmegen, The
Netherlands, and the Department of Development Economics of Hawassa University
in Ethiopia. The team analysed the effects of BOAM interventions using two cases
from the honey and oilseeds value chains, with a focus on interventions that
specifically targeted actors located at the middle of the value chain. The chapter
discusses a theoretical framework that was developed by the study team to help
understand the mechanisms through which value chain interventions influence