Afghanistan's almond growers have no doubt about the quality of what they produce. Their frustration lies elsewhere:

"Fortunately, we and our products have a special value in terms of quality in the world market. But the only problem is that the product does not have a certificate for exporting, so our products are not recognized."

It is a story repeated across the country's most promising value chains. The grapes, raisins, almonds and cashmere are there and so is the skill to produce them. What is missing sits in the space between the farm and the export market: certification that buyers recognize, handling and storage that preserve quality, finance that does not trap growers in debt, and the standards that turn a valued local product into a sellable international one. The barrier is rarely the product, but the system around it.

A programme built around the barriers

In 2025, amid economic isolation and logistical constraints, ICPSD's Crisis & Resilience portfolio and UNDP Afghanistan ran the Value Addition Programme, training 343 micro, small and medium enterprises across the grape and raisin, almond, and cashmere value chains. The curriculum answered the barriers the businesses themselves had named: building and testing a business model, value-addition, financial analysis and access to loans, certification and export compliance, and value-chain-specific handling, from pre-harvest through packaging and labelling.

After the programme ended, participants were surveyed, and the strongest response came where it mattered most: in the handling module, covering the storage, processing and packaging that protect quality, the satisfaction was 94%, and the certification and compliance module, built for the very recognition the almond growers were asking for, reached 85%.

Building on these efforts, a Trade Facilitation Training Programme reached an additional 432 MSMEs across Balkh, Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar provinces, including 240 women and 192 men. The programme was designed to strengthen export readiness and international market participation by equipping businesses with practical knowledge and skills across four key areas.

Satisfaction rates ranged from 91% to 95%, with the highest rating recorded for the Export Readiness and Global Trade Opportunities module (95%), followed by Export Finance and Payment Methods (93%), Export Procedures and Documentation (92%), and Market Research and Export Marketing (91%).

Together, the Value Addition and Trade Facilitation programmes equipped 775 MSMEs with practical skills to improve product quality, meet export requirements, access financing, identify new markets, and participate more effectively in international trade. Whether that converts into certificates issued, shipments cleared and income retained is the measure that matters next.

In one of the world's hardest operating environments, the constraint was never the talent or the product. It was access to the standards, the finance and the handling know-how that turn a good crop into a sellable export.

ICPSD's Crisis & Resilience portfolio supports private sector recovery and MSME resilience in fragile and crisis-affected contexts. To explore what an engagement could look like in your country, reach out to ICPSD's Crisis & Resilience team: icpsd@undp.org