Examining the impacts of value-chain development in agro-processing in India

Under Gramyashakti, ACCESS will establish and scale four new spice processing farmer producer companies in the states of Rajasthan, Odisha and West Bengal, mobilizing at least 800 female participants (Table 1). The main interventions proposed in the first year of implementation are (i) technical training on spice processing and storing, (ii) training on business management and strategy, (iii) training on gender and leadership and (iv) establishing four new common processing facilities. Towards the end of the second year, and once market linkages have been established through B2B and B2C channels, spices procured by the company will be marketed under a high-value brand.

2021-11-30

2023-07-31

Women's participation in entrepreneurial activities, Women’s social networks, Women's weaving skills, enterprises production, Women's income, Women's confidence, Women’s ownership and control over productive and financial assets, Sales/Profits of collective enterprise, Women’s agency in (i) personal (ii) household (iii) enterprise and (iv) community decision making

To measure project impact, we propose a cluster randomized control trial (CRCT) with the village as the unit of randomisation. The village is the appropriate unit for randomisation because these are the geographical areas from which women are mobilized into FPOs. An FPO typically includes 20-25 women from the same village who form the grassroot level group enterprise, which are federated into the producer company. ACCESS’s partner villages in Rajasthan, Odisha and West Bengal form our sampling frame.
An important criterion that determined the feasibility of including villages in the project was the distance of villages from the central processing units (CPUs) that would be set up by ACCESS under the project. The location of the CPUs were identified by the ACCESS team in collaboration with the livelihoods departments of the respective states and are therefore endogenous to village characteristics. We excluded these CPU villages and requested ACCESS to identify villages close to the CPU villages from where women could be mobilised. This gave us a sample frame of 91 villages. We used the Census 2011 data to match village characteristics of our sample village. We block randomised villages using census village administrative clusters (also called blocks) while ensuring balance on female literacy rate, percentage of women in agricultural cultivation, percentage of men in agricultural cultivation and whether the village was accessible by all weather roads

Not available

Centralised computer in office

Village

Yes

91

3500

46