Private Sector

Facilitating Pro-Poor Value Chains

 

Focus Area

In an increasingly globalized and competitive world economy, integrating poor smallholder producers and entrepreneurs into local and global value chains is increasingly recognized as an effective tool for poverty reduction. UNDP helps develop value chains in market sectors that offer the prospect of sustainable growth and transition to higher valued added and better remunerated forms of employment for poor communities. Specific priority is given to those commodity product and services markets characterized by a high labor intensity.

UNDP Role

UNDP's Growing Sustainable Business (GSB) program facilitates business-led solutions to poverty in advancement of the Millennium Development Goals. GSB brokers pro-poor investments that accelerate and sustain access by the poor to needed goods and services, employment and livelihood opportunities. GSB has established local programs in over 15 countries across Asia, Africa and Eastern & Central Europe.

Approximately half of all projects in the current GSB portfolio are value chain related and explicitly involve working with lead firms (buyers, retailers, traders, input suppliers) to promote demand-driven investments that benefit subordinate producers, often through contract farming schemes or other local sourcing arrangements. By working with large lead companies, GSB aims to improve the competitiveness of key value chains in which large numbers of poor people are active as producers, consumers and wage-earners.