South-North Value Chain Innovation

 

The Need

  • The BOP: the world's largest untapped market – teeming with latent talent, resources, and innovation.
  • Highly differentiated contexts, each with its own needs, constraints, and standards form a de facto scale-limiter, making it difficult for small producers to optimize their supply chain, and their incomes.
  • Inaccessible capital further undermines the development of livelihoods, even for best-in-class products and solutions.

Differentiation

  • Identify innovative products, services and models that address needs beyond local markets and can enter wider supply chains.
  • Scout developed markets and facilitate match-making links ranging from ready-made, to shovel-ready.
  • Build on LINK’s last-mile network of implementers to source, test, and scale the most impactful solutions to sustainable livelihoods.

The Solution

  • Customers eventually come up against an impact ceiling - their incomes maxed out. For those with the desire and capacity to go further, we offer innovative south-north supply chain solutions, proliferate distributed ownership models, broker producer-buyer partnerships, and provide other products or services where demand is verified. By doing so, we turn farmers into producers, add off-farm income generating options to on-farm income streams, thus advancing economic outcomes and prosperity.
 
 

Case Study: On-farm to Off-farm Income Accelerator

 
 
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Approach

  • The “hub and spoke” model - a complete solution - enabling farmers to become producers.

  • Increased efficiency and profitability of micro-enterprises.

  • Deep hand holding with community-based professional managers and micro-enterprise leaders.

Results

  • Tens of millions of eligible farmers. Hundreds of thousands have become producers already, with higher incomes and greater ownership of value chains.

  • These value chains now supply to hundreds of larger companies seeking fair and sustainable sourcing.

  • Sustainable, globally compliant, high-quality, competitive supply chains created.

Impact Outcome

  • Incomes increase from between 3x to 10x

  • Spillover effects: first time health insurance, better nutrition, healthier homes

  • Reduced forced economic migration.

Today, there is an opportunity to develop new social business models that go beyond “last-mile” farmers