Pressure-cooking for progress

Writeshop on value chain financing

Tags: Knowledge programme

Knowledge is needed to effectively serve poor and marginalised groups by making grounded choices for strategies and projects, and to timely adapt to change. How can development organisations acquire this knowledge? Hire more consultants? Go to the university? Development organisations need to build their own knowledge base and their own strategies to make this base grow. Development organisations need more tools and interactions to drive their own, practice-based forms of learning. A key element of such learning is that the organisation’s own experiences need to be confronted and blended with those of their peers and with academic knowledge.

Writeshops are one of the forms to facilitate this interaction between practitioners and academics. A writeshop is a short but intensive effort of practitioners to jointly with academics analyse experiences and write down lessons learned: pressure-cooking for progress. A recent example was the writeshop on ‘value chain financing’ with participation of some 20 organisations from Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe. The writeshop was developed by the Royal Tropical Institute and International Institute of Rural Reconstruction in collaboration with Triodos, ICCO, Terrafina, Ford Foundation, DGIS, IFAD and Hivos. Aside from contributing some best practices of successful partners, Hivos actively participated in the writeshop with a senior staff member experienced in value chain financing and co-financed the writeshop from the Hivos Knowledge Fund. The concept of ‘value chain’ refers to the structure between farmers growing high-quality products and the final buyers (e.g. a retailing company). ‘Value chain financing’ is an innovative way for financial institutions to deliver financial services to rural producers and agribusiness by building on the relations between the actors in the chain. An advantage of this is that operators in the value chain may get credit because they are vouched for by the buyers (domestic or international). Thirteen cases from around the world were analysed in the writeshop, of which five from Hivos partners. One example is the honey case experience in Kitui District, Kenya, where short-term loans and micro-leasing are made available for beekeepers and traders by local Financial Service Associations. A local development organisation assists traders in training beekeepers for improving the quality and quantity of the honey. A national bank provides invoice factoring services so that the processing agency can pay traders without delaying payments. This arrangement has enabled small farmers to access a new market for their produce, access (short and medium term) finance, and improve their incomes. The results of the writeshop were lots of learning by all participants by blending theory (e.g. formats, distillation of cross-cutting themes, etc.) and practice. Another output of the writeshop is the book on the cases and cross-cutting themes, targeting a wide circle of practitioners and academics, expected to be launched in October 2009. In response to the interest for more knowledge sharing identified by the Hivos partners that participated in the writeshop, Hivos is now facilitating the creation of a knowledge network.