This chapter discusses how accounting for macroeconomic perspectives when establishing agricultural policies can help African governments ensure that their agricultural sectors become productive, competitive, and lucrative across agricultural value chains. It presents the two-way linkages between agriculture-led growth strategies and macroeconomic policies by focusing on price, fiscal, monetary, exchange rate, and trade policies.

This paper provides an overview of a research project that assessed the long-term impact of three antipoverty interventions in Bangladesh—the introduction of new agricultural technologies, educational transfers, and microfinance—on monetary and non monetary measures of well-being. This paper begins by setting out the conceptual framework, methodology, and empirical methods used for the evaluation of long-term impacts. It discusses the context of the evaluations and the longitudinal data used.

This Institutional Learning and Change Initiative working paper provides a thoughtful discussion of the statistical assumptions underlying randomized controlled trials as well as guidance for implementation and interpreting results.

This FAO report provides tools to help include small producers in the production process and the market from the value chain perspective. It contains information on how to select a value chain for an intervention, make partnerships, and monitor and evaluate the success of those partnerships.

This methodological proposal is aimed at promoting and developing business partnerships. It provides tools to help include small producers in the production process and the market from the value chain perspective.

This guide is the third in a series from CIAT designed to support agencies implementing a participatory approach to rural agroenterprise development.

The aim of this guide is to provide a simple and systematic participatory method for gathering market information to identify products and services for agroenterprise development.

This guide from the World Banks presents 13 tools for conducting value chain analysis with accompanying case studies for each. The tools include recommendations for selecting value chains, assessing market opportunities, benchmarking and comparing value chains to identify gaps, scaling replicable business models, and monitoring value chain projects.

A Feed the Future (FTF) program is being planned for Sierra Leone, encompassing diversified, nutrition- sensitive agriculture. It will focus primarily on one district (Tonkolili or Bombali), to be identified per research and discussions with the Government of Sierra Leone (GoSL).

This article reviews 11 guides for value-chain analysis and development. It compares the guides’ concepts, objectives, and methods and identifies strengths, weaknesses, and gaps. The assessment characterizes the state of the art for designing interventions and interactions that seek to build value chains with smallholders. The article is organized as follows: the next section presents the methodology applied in carrying out the review, the following section presents the results of this review, and the final section provides concluding comments.

These guidelines provide users with the key notions required to carry out analyses of policy impacts by means of a value chain approach and show how to do it in a practical way by making use of relevant tools. In particular, the reader will find this material useful to: