New Graduation Programs- Mentoring Support or Market Development?
My colleague Ric Goodman (former Director of the Chars Livelihoods Program in Bangladesh) and I are in the process of designing the Graduation Program in Laos, and are coming up against a very fundamental issue, and could really gain from your insights and experience. We are designing the intervention on a tight budget (of course!), and have currently budgeted significant resources for weekly household visits by facilitators. However, we are also emphasizing strong market linkages in this program, and are thus suggesting strong investment into appropriate staff and resources to develop value chains for the enterprises that the participants are given.
Ric and I are therefore discussing what should take precedence for the pilot: more resources to market development (e.g. market studies, enterprise specialists to work with the implementing organizations, technical experts to work alongside the beneficiaries), at the risk of less ‘mentoring support’ and regular weekly household visits? Or more emphasis on regular household visits and mentoring, and with less resources dedicated toward strengthening enterprises and value chains? Ric supports the former (his experience with CLP shows that light touch household support and greater focus on markets makes the interventions more sustainable and scalable), while I am for the latter (CGAP-Ford Graduation Programs show that strong mentoring is key in enabling households to engage and make the most of their enterprises).
With finite resources (as with all your program), what takes precedence? Of these two elements, what did you prioritize for your pilot, and what did you prioritize for scale-up? Not just the balance required for achieving short-term impact, but what you feel is required to achieve scale, efficiency and longer-term impact.
Household level mentoring and hand holding are key to graduation. In a country like India where State is proactive but delivery level challenges are many, state transfers and market transfers should be well balanced which can not come easily without intense hand holding. May be hand holding to hand in hand to shaking hand should be well sequenced. The livelihoods options are very basic and just above subsistence. So market linkages which come at later stage when enterprise is formed or transformed are second priority. If they can have strong market tuning how can they remain ultra poor? the question is at what stage of graduation?
Dear Karishma and Ric:
If I had to choose I would invest in mentoring support. Particulary in Colombia there has been chain analysis for at least the last 15 years and there is no evidence that the poor benefit from this model. In Peru IFAD has developed an strategy that relies on giving cash directly to program participants so they can buy the goods and services required for their activities and this approach has been successful.
I suggest to have a look of a couple of documents that refers to this experience:
“Diez Claves de Exito para el Desarrollo Rural” by Pierre de Zutter
http://www.proyectograduacion.org/biblioteca/documentos.php
“La innovación exitosa en proyectos FIDA”
http://www.proyectograduacion.org/biblioteca/documentos.php
Recently I prepared some toughts for a meeting in South Africa since they are also thinking about designing a graduation pilot. I can share the presentation with you. If you are interested, please, do not hesitate to e-mail me. Good luck and best wishes for 2013.
Dear Karishma and Ric,
I don’t have experience with Laos so don’t know what the livelihood landscape is there (nor the conditions or characteristics of poverty there). Are you shifting participants from wage labor activities to IGAs that are mostly subsistence activities or rely on small local markets? If so, then that would be similar to our experience in India and I’d agree with Divakar–at the outset participants will pursue very small-scale activities. Handholding may be more valuable at this stage to build confidence and skills to take the huge risk incumbent in that shift. Market interventions later, after participants have built their confidence, may make sense.
In other context with limited market access then there may be no choice but to devote more funds to market research and seek other creative ways of handholding–perhaps some kind of mutual-support system among participants. Will you have a savings component in this program? If so, another possibility might be to try using the groups as the vehicle for some of the handholding.
Any of these options are very context-specific, of course.
Best wishes for the project! I look forward to hearing about it when it launches!