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Interactive Lab

Livelihoods & Value-Chain Lab

Design a livelihoods intervention from the ground up — map who does what along a commodity chain, read the target group's five capitals, find the leverage points that unlock a market system, and pick the right Indian programme to invest behind.

Context & Actors

Every livelihoods programme starts with a clear picture of what is being produced, where, for whom, and who else is in the chain. Fill this in first — the later tabs build on it.

The Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF). Popularised by DFID in the late 1990s, the SLF reads a household's asset base as five capitals. Poverty is not just low income — it is a thin, fragile portfolio of these assets. Note what your target group holds (and lacks) in each. Framework

The five capitals — note the target group's asset base

Human capital

Skills, knowledge, labour, health.

Social capital

Networks, groups, SHGs, trust, collective voice.

Natural capital

Land, water, forests, grazing, biodiversity.

Physical capital

Tools, roads, storage, power, connectivity.

Financial capital

Savings, credit, remittances, wages, insurance.

Actors in and around the chain

List the people and institutions who touch this commodity — producers, traders, aggregators, processors, buyers, and the support actors (banks, extension, SHGs, government line departments).

Value-Chain Map

Build the chain node by node, from raw input to the end market. For each node, name the actors, the activity they perform, and (if you know it) the approximate share of the final price captured at that stage.

The canonical stages: Input supply Production Aggregation Processing Marketing / wholesale Retail / end-market Value is added at each step; so is margin. Mapping where the margin sits tells you where the poor are — and are not — capturing value.

Your value chain

Constraints & Leverage

A value-chain map shows the plumbing; the Making Markets Work for the Poor (M4P) lens asks why it leaks. For each node, name the binding constraint and decide whether it is a supporting-function failure or a rules / norms failure — then flag the ones that are true leverage points.

The M4P market-system frame (DFID / SDC, operationalised by the DCED): a market is not just buyers and sellers. Around every core transaction sit supporting functions (information, finance, skills, infrastructure, inputs) and rules (standards, regulations, informal norms, market power). Poverty persists where these fail. Fixing them — rather than doing the market actor's job for them — is the M4P bet. Framework
Leverage, not effort. A leverage point is where a small, well-placed change ripples through the system — e.g. putting a shared milk-fat analyser at the collection point can shift the terms of every future transaction, not just one. Ask of each constraint: if this were fixed, would the market keep working differently on its own?

Intervention & Skills

Now design the response. Pick an intervention type, link it to a real Indian programme where one fits, note the skills gap you must close, and define how you will know it worked.

Programmes you can build on:
  • DAY-NRLM & SHG federations — the National Rural Livelihoods Mission mobilises women into self-help groups, village organisations and cluster-level federations; the backbone for social capital and last-mile finance.
  • FPOs (Farmer Producer Organisations) — member-owned aggregation and collective bargaining, supported under the central FPO promotion scheme via NABARD, SFAC and others.
  • PMKVY / Skill India — the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana and the wider Skill India mission fund short-term skilling and recognition of prior learning.
  • MGNREGA — the rural employment guarantee acts as a wage floor and a safety net that de-risks the transition into new livelihoods.
Real programmes

Skills-gap note

What must the target group learn to move up the chain — and who will deliver it (SHG cadre, PMKVY partner, FPO staff)?

Success indicators

How will you know livelihoods improved — not just that activities happened? Add clear, verifiable indicators.

Don't do the market's job. The M4P discipline is to build a function that the market keeps running after you leave — a fee-charging quality service, a trader who now sources direct, an FPO that renegotiates every year — rather than a subsidy that collapses the day funding ends. Design for the exit from day one. Design principle

Plan ready

You've moved from context, to chain, to constraints, to a market-systems intervention. Export your plain-text livelihoods & value-chain plan and take it to the field.

Value Chains Five Capitals M4P FPO / NRLM Skilling
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