Prototype guide for integrating gender into participatory market chain approach

Why is the manual important?

This manual aims at stimulating market chain innovations that promote win-win relationships between market actors and smallholder farmers in order to facilitate their participation in the value chain.

It also aims to integrate a gender perspective and gender analysis into the participatory market chain approach capacity-building process, specifically in PMCA training workshops.

Who is the manual for?

The manual helps practitioners, PMCA trainers and facilitators on how to incorporate a gender perspective and use specific gender tools during a PMCA application.

Country of focus: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Peru.

How can I use the manual?

This manual compliments the existing PMCA User's and Trainer's Guides. It presents a sequence of four training workshops for PMCA capacity building where gender analysis and tools are introduced in each phase of PMCA. It provides gender tools and new insights from field practice.

What this guide can do

• introduce key concepts on gender and value chains: why, how and when to introduce gender in value chain analyses and interventions.
• introduce and integrate gender analysis and a gender perspective into the PMCA capacity-building process, specifically considering the PMCA training workshops described in the previous PMCA Trainer's Guide and outlined in this guide.
• describe how to incorporate gender concerns throughout the three phases of PMCA, by using gender analysis, planning and evaluation tools or existing PMCA tools with a gender lens, and provide illustrative examples of how to use those tools.
• Identify check points of each PMCA phase for helping trainers in their backstopping activities, ensuring that gender concerns are effectively incorporated.

When and how was it developed?

This manual was developed in 2005 by the International Potato Center (CIP) with the experience gained in the Andes region. It has been applied to several value chains in East Africa and Asia, and has proved to be a powerful approach to fostering market-driven innovations and facilitating smallholder inclusion.

Two methodological support tools related to the PMCA approach have been developed:

•    The PMCA User’s Guide (2012), which supports PMCA implementations guided by facilitators and the institution leading the process (available in English and Spanish); 
•    A Trainer’s Guide, which provides strategic guidance to trainers who are building capacity of PMCA facilitators (available only in Spanish).

Both guides have been applied and validated in the Andes, East Africa and South West Asia.

Where can I get the manual? Who can I contact?

Read the manual here or download the pdf version (1.21 MB).