Côte d’Ivoire Country Pilot

The Côte d’Ivoire Economic Inclusion into Value Chains pilot has explored ways to increase the earnings of the poorest smallholder farmers by connecting them to value chains. The core of this approach is to simultaneously help farmers increase their productivity while also developing the market for their produce by supporting other actors in the chain, such as rice mills.

The pilot focuses on the rice value chain, which has a high potential for inclusive employment and income generation given the widespread cultivation of rice even among the poorest households. Rice is also a strategic crop for the country and has the potential for value addition, and thus higher prices for the farmers.

The pilot is conducted in partnership with the Côte d’Ivoire Productive Social Safety Net (PSSN) project. The PSSN provides 125,000 households with quarterly cash transfers of US$60 for three years. It also supports its beneficiaries to develop or expand its economic activities through entrepreneurship training, savings groups, small business grants, and coaching. Under this pilot, it is examined whether this could also be done by linking them to a value chain, and to explore synergies arising from combining approaches.

Project Insights

Recent Reports

Project Documents

Progress report 2021
Progress report 2020
Côte d’Ivoire Economic Inclusion into Value Chains – 2019 Progress Report (English)
Côte d’Ivoire Economic Inclusion into Value Chains – 2019 Progress Report Summary (French)
Côte d’Ivoire Economic Inclusion into Value Chains – Project document (updated as of December 2019)
Côte d’Ivoire Economic Inclusion into Value Chains – Concept note

Background Documents

Key Activities

Background Documents

The pilot supports the following three activities:

Connecting farmers to growing markets
The pilot connects the cash transfer beneficiary rice-growing households to better paying urban markets by linking them with local rice mills through production contracts.Based on the contract, smallholder farmers are granted access to commercial loans by a microfinance institute to buy quality seeds and fertilizers. Farmers are also offered extension services to improve their productivity and the quality of the paddy rice. Rice mills are granted access to working capital on a commercial basis to buy the paddy rice at a predetermined price from contracted farmers in cash at the time of harvest. Further, mill owners, managers, and employees receive management training to improve their operating procedures, commercialization practices, and financial management, and strengthen their market linkages.The simultaneous attention to strengthening product/labor supply (smallholder farmer) and product/labor demand (the mill) is the essence of inclusive value chain development.
Rigorous evaluation of jobs and welfare outcomes
An impact evaluation will evaluate jobs and welfare outcomes achieved through the inclusive value chain development approach and the cash transfers that target the poorest households in the intervention villages. The novelties of the pilot lie in the application of an inclusive value chain development approach to a staple crop (rice) — for staple crops, product differentiation is usually more limited and contract breach more likely—and the linkage of inclusive value chain development with cash transfers as an alternative to generic economic inclusion packages.
Knowledge sharing with stakeholders
Findings from the pilot will be utilized to inform:
- The implementation of Côte d’Ivoire’s national rice development strategy and the Productive Social Safety Net project;
- The next generation of WBG employment and poverty alleviation interventions in Côte d’Ivoire and beyond.
The knowledge from the Côte d’Ivoire Jobs pilot will be broadly disseminated with the findings of the other pilots funded under the Jobs Multi-Donor Trust Fund. The series aim to test more comprehensive, integrated approaches to job creation.