CARE's Lessons from Bangladesh and Ethiopia: Promoting food security & resilience

The MPEP Seminar entitled Pushing the Limits: Lessons from CARE on Market Systems Approaches, Food Security, and Resilience featured Christian Pennotti, Senior Technical Advisor for Learning and Impact with CARE’s Economic Development Unit, in a discussion on lessons learned from two USAID-sponsored programs – one in Bangladesh and one in Ethiopia – as well as five key considerations that inform CARE’s practice.

Christian began by sharing lessons from CARE’s work in Bangladesh’s dairy sector. The program used a value chain framework to drive benefits for 36,400 smallholder producers—households that owned between one and three cows. Over the past four years, the program has seen strong results, including a 140% increase in production, 100-255% increase in income from dairy, and a 75% increase in household consumption of dairy. From this experience, CARE found that the gender composition of the groups and the sex of the leader were very important; groups composed only of women and/or led by women outperformed groups led by men. Another key learning was that enabling smallholder choice means balancing efficiency and redundancy, i.e. the trade-offs between a more efficient approach that focuses on one channel and one that fosters competition. This balancing also helps bridge the gender asset gap. In conclusion, CARE learned that food security and productivity are closely intertwined with women’s empowerment—their access to resources, position on the value chain, and decision-making ability; indicators that were all improving in this model.

The second initiative Christian discussed was in Ethiopia, where CARE has been working with USAID on a push-pull model targeting ultra-poor smallholder farmer households to help them move up to positions of food security. This model builds in financial inclusion and resilience by attempting to make the households market-ready as well as make the market ready for these households, and by improving the adaptive capacity of the households and the system they are trying to engage with. The lessons learned from this were that the push-pull model contributes to graduation and improved resilience (households in the program were better equipped to stabilize after the drought), households engaged in multiple value chains are more likely to graduate (particularly for female-headed households), and that Village Savings & Loans Associations (VSLA) are a promising foundation on which to build (although the relationship between VSLAs and producer groups needs to be improved and more needs to be done to address women’s mobility and domestic violence).

So how have these lessons influenced CARE’s work? Christian focused on five good practices CARE is applying in their initiatives:

• Expanding the scale of implementing the push-pull model to improve the livelihoods of vulnerable households and respond to shocks, such as droughts. CARE is implementing adaptations of this model in six countries - Mali, Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Bangladesh, India, and Ethiopia.
• Streamlining implementation across these programs to better integrate the ever-increasing considerations inherent to the realities on the ground.
• Better understanding of inter- and intra-group dynamics, as many of CARE’s models are based around groups. Therefore, CARE is exploring better ways to support and empower groups through improved understanding of group dynamics, vertical and horizontal relationships between groups, as well as gender relations.
• Focusing on optimizing models to support resilient livelihoods. Strategies must look at multi-intervention strategies to better position vulnerable households to respond to shocks, through formal market integration and informal channels.
• Capacity transformation, as distinct from capacity building, in helping local organizations and staff that may have had a singular focus wear multiple lenses.

The seminar concluded with a lively audience question and answer session.