Co-creating Local Value Chains

Co-creating Local Value Chains

This post is the fifth in a six-part series on Nuru’s rural livelihoods programming and how it helps farmers and their families take steps to move from surviving to thriving in their communities. The first postsecond postthird post, and fourth post can be viewed by clicking the corresponding links.

Market-Based Development

One of the keys to developing and balancing the rural farmer capacities necessary for shock resilience is employing grounded and adaptive market-based approaches to development.

These approaches must simultaneously lay the foundation for specialization, professional record-keeping and market access, as well as ensuring that the livelihood diversification already in practice contributes to further food security. Nuru-supported farmer organizations are member-led agribusinesses with community interests represented by the very people that make up that community, like in Genda district of Ethiopia and Rebwi in Kenya. They engage with their neighbors during meetings and very literally define responsible business practice everyday. The farmer organizations communicate with the communities down the road on crop prices, input quality and cost, and they augment and increase the social cohesion necessary for the growth of a fair and safe rural economy that puts the highest practical value on the land and its people.

How Nuru Helps Rural Farmers

Nuru works closely with the farmer organizations for a period of years, providing capacity development training to leaders, boards of directors, and champion members to lay a sustainable foundation for continued prosperity without the need for Nuru services. Unfortunately, even the greatest efforts of farmers and their organizations cannot prevent the crash of commodity markets and prices, or stop a drought, alone. Nuru approaches value chains with a renewed focus on what technologies, assets, and investments can limit post-harvest loss, over-specialization, and ensure rural households have diversified their commercialized production to offset market collapse.

Moreover, Nuru acts as a mediator for farmer organizations every step along the value chain to encourage entrepreneurial actions, but also to protect against exploitive interests. Most importantly, this effort to build value chains from the ground up requires motivated partners at all scales, but a diverse set of partners, locally, are a necessity. Partners like local branch officers from Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB), Ethiopian cooperative development agents, and Seed Co Kenya input experts that are working with Nuru to deliver the services that are useful to farmers. Through pragmatic partnerships, rural prosperity and meaningful choices for rural families can be realized through co-created local value chains.

Nuru will further discuss this topic through our experiences in an upcoming blog series on USAID’s Marketlinks.

About Casey Harrison

Livelihoods & Agribusiness Director — Casey was born and raised on a farm in rural Maryland, and has worked at the nexus of smallholder farming in Africa and natural resource management since 2009. Prior to Nuru, he contributed as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Zambia where he served as an agricultural extension agent, and worked with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on mitigating the negative environmental and social impacts of agricultural production and value chains with a focus on East and Southern Africa. He has completed a dual MA in Natural Resource Management and International Affairs from American University in Washington DC and the University for Peace in Costa Rica, and in his free time, Casey enjoys traveling, backpacking, biking, and live music of all kinds.

Read More Stories of Hope

Because everybody deserves a chance at a better life.

Together, we can help farmers in Africa chart a path to a better future.

Join Us.

More Ways to Give