Value Chain Development

Laté Lawson-Lartego, director of the economic development unit at CARE USA, who was responsible for developing the initial proposal to work in the dairy sector in Bangladesh, offers a view of CARE’s approach: “A value chain approach is really an exercise in seeing the entire economic and social market system. As we see it, developing, strengthening, or upgrading a value chain is the process of increasing the value that is created and ensuring that value is distributed as equitably as possible, with emphasis on benefits for participants that are the least well-off, and especially women.”1 For CARE, the value chain approach takes a systems perspective and is holistic; quite simply, CARE sees a chain in which each link is as important as any other and, therefore, one must identify the weakest links and their obstacles or constraints and devise strategies to strengthen them in partnership with other value chain actors. It looks holistically at various pieces—the adoption of updated agricultural methods, gender, access to services and inputs, and relationships between other value chain actors—and looks for leverage points that can be addressed to improve the functioning and competitiveness of the entire chain.