Inclusivity in the Agricultural Value Chains

Learning from the Experience of ASEAN Countries

Abstract

The paper will present the learnings from the Grow Asia network’s raft of value chain projects across ASEAN. These are developed and implemented by multistakeholder partnerships (MSP) from the private, public, and civil sectors that focus on operating together in the precompetitive space. In total, the Grow Asia network, of five country partnerships, has thirty-seven value chain projects at various stages of design, piloting, and implementation, of which 27% are sufficiently mature that their impact and outcome can be measured with some confidence. Seven of these subprojects have been subjected to independent case studies. These have been used to verify the results, map out the impact narrative, and to distil the learning of what works and what does not. The paper consolidates those findings into lessons, some of which are unsurprising, while others demonstrate the innovation, unexpected modes of operatin, as well as the effectiveness of taking a multistakeholder approach. Figures will be given on numbers of farmers positively impacted by the projects, as well as the average individual and aggregated incremental incomes improvement across geophysics and enterprises. Additionally, the paper will highlight important learnings on how to improve the effectiveness of working groups and the importance of taking four alternative pathways to scale so that individual value chain projects can be used as a launch pad towards greater impact.