Building Businesses with Small Producers: A comparative analysis, IDRC/ITDG 2002

Description
Building Businesses with Small Producers presents the findings and a comparative analysis of seven case studies that challenge current beliefs about good practice in the provision of business development services (BDS) to small and micro enterprises. The book also highlights issues concerning the assessment of impact, sustainability, and cost-effectiveness of such services.

The most striking feature of the seven case studies is the scale of their ambition. These were not short-term, minimalist interventions aimed at addressing imperfections in generally well-functioning markets. These projects were attempting to bring about basic, structural change by introducing new economic activities. They helped poor and generally rural people, whose activities were previously limited to the production of primary crops, gain access to commercial activities and they addressed traditionally unequal power relationships between poor producers and other actors further up the value chain.

The success of the projects lies not in identifying growth enterprises, but rather subsectors with growth potential and the bottlenecks that constrain the many small producers within them.

Methods for info gathering
Case studies

Summary of results
Each of the projects reviewed in this book attempted, some quite successfully, to link up with the private sector to help sustain the effectiveness of the BDS interventions after the NGOs and donor support were gone. In addition, Several of the case studies in this book show strong synergies between credit and BDS and several different patterns are evident.

The book can be read online via the IDRC website (see link above). You can buy a hard copy of this book online at the Practical Action Bookshop.