Rural Business Development Services

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KIT Dossier Rural Business Development Services

Last update: Tuesday 27 March 2012

Understanding business development services
 

KIT documents and analyzes experiences with and cases of RBDS and related subjects (see references below). KIT does so by working with a number of organizations, particularly looking for answers to the following challenges:

·         Sustaining local service provision by delineating and balancing public and private roles and investments, as well as public-private partnerships.

·         Inclusiveness of service provision and the need for social targeting if RBDS is to benefit (women) smallholders who normally belong to the poorest layers of the population; as well as the trade-off with financial sustainability .

·         The need to build the capacity and change current behavior of service providers if market-oriented advisory services are to become effective in triggering change.

·         The need for both downward and upward accountability mechanisms from supplier to user/client. The client (smallholder) has to know what the service supplier has done (with whose money and how), and to whose demand it is attending. At the same time, in cases where services are provided as part of transactions (e.g. where farmers are provided technical support in exchange to selling the produce to the service-provider), services-users have to be accountable to service providers.

Together with Agri-ProFocus (APF, a network of organizations working on farmer entrepreneurship), FAO and CTA (the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation), KIT is working to contribute to the practical understanding on how to secure access to rural business development services in a sustainable manner by smallholder producers. It does so through:

·         Taking stock of experiences with sustainable Rural Business Development Services (RBDS) in Zambia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Uganda, Kenya, Ghana and Rwanda in order to identify innovative practices and gather/analyze lessons learnt. Individuals involved in the implementation of these cases will be brought together in an international writeshop (8-12 October 2012 in Addis Ababa), leading on a book to be published early 2013.

·         Organizing a number of parallel sessions/meetings to the Conference “Making the connection: value chains for transforming smallholder agriculture”, to be held in Addis Ababa, 6-9 November 2012. At this opportunity, representatives of a number of knowledge institutes in Africa will come together to look at the main conclusions of the writeshop (see above) and jointly define policy messages.

·         These same knowledge institutes will work with KIT, APF and partners to develop training guidelines on RBDS for higher education.

In addition, KIT actively participates in efforts led by the African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS) to further develop the theme, under the rubric of Market Oriented Agricultural Advisory Services (MOAAS). It is also working with larger (public- sector driven) agricultural advisory service systems such as PRONEA (National Programme for Agricultural Extension) in Mozambique, NAADS (National Agricultural Advisory Services) in Uganda, and PASNVA (National Agriculture Extension Support Project) and SPAT (Strategic Plan for Agricultural Transformation) in Rwanda aiming at providing more market-oriented services.

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Rural Innovation Systems

Contact

For questions or suggestions about this dossier, please contact the editor, Sjon van 't Hof, at s.v.t.hof@kit.nl.