The development community has long been in pursuit of partnerships with public and private sector actors to improve market systems. At its best, these partnerships result in more inclusive and more sustainable market systems interventions. In Pakistan, the USAID Punjab Enabling Environment Project (PEEP) leveraged the power of partnerships to create a platform for women’s economic empowerment in the livestock sector.

Partners in Inclusion

Nearly a quarter of Pakistan’s gross domestic product is linked to the agriculture sector, and 55 percent of this sector is livestock. Despite its importance, the productivity per animal in terms of milk and meat yield is among the lowest in the region. Small farmers and specifically rural women make up the vast majority of producers in the livestock sector, mainly concentrated in the southern districts of Punjab. It naturally followed that the key for boosting the productivity of the livestock sector was in the technical and economic empowerment of women in these value chains.

Improving the livestock sector was never going to be a one-activity solution. USAID PEEP did not seek to directly provide the many services the farmers in the livestock sector required since the sustainability of the interventions would be dubious, to say the least. Instead, the project stepped back to analyze the incentives of the market system actors that touched the livestock sector—many of them already project partners—and addressed their pain points in providing more inclusive services. USAID PEEP’s role was to convene and align the incentives of all its partner market systems actors for achieving women’s economic empowerment. Most critically, these actors entered a formal joint-partnership with one another, not just the project. These partners, now engaged with one another through an initiative dubbed WEinSPIRE, provided well-rounded services to women livestock farmers in southern Punjab, including:

• Access to Husbandry Services: USAID PEEP partnered with the Livestock and Dairy Development Department and the Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry as part of the WEinSPIRE initiative to ensure outreach, local ownership and sustainability. The Department and Chamber’s targets for increased service provision and outreach aligned with USAID PEEP’s objective of supporting a more inclusive market system. With USAID PEEP support, the Department and the Chamber developed an innovative mobile training program for improving the productivity of women livestock farmers in southern Punjab—bringing training to women’s doorsteps through converted school buses. WEinSPIRE also linked women with local extension workers for reliable access to vaccination and treatment for animals.
• Access to Finance: Smallholder farmers need access to finance to purchase animals, inputs and services for their livestock business but lack knowledge and collateral to access finance from the market. Microfinance institutions have the incentive to increase their client base with trusted borrowers. To build that trust, PEEP adopted a three-pronged strategy: through the WEinSPIRE platform, it helped women farmers join the Livestock Breeders Associations so they can maintain certified records of their animals; it organized financial and business management trainings for farmers in collaboration with the Women’s Chamber of Commerce; and it helped the local microfinance institutions that joined the WEinSPIRE platform to develop specialized loan products for women livestock farmers.
• Access to Information: In addition to finance, smallholder farmers need access to information on husbandry best practices, prices and location of markets. The WEinSPIRE platform includes telecommunications companies looking for expanded clientele to fulfill the farmers’ need for access to information and facilitate their entry into the market system.
• Access to Markets: The Livestock Breeders Associations that have joined the WEinSPIRE initiative help farmers access improved animal breeds. PEEP, again, capitalized on the breeders’ incentives to increase livestock sales to bring them into the initiative and to provide farmers access to quality animals for purchase, rearing and subsequent sale.

Learning at #SEEP2018

As the market system matures, the different actors have started interacting independently developing new linkages and initiatives. During the Progress through Partnerships: Engaging Market Actors for Women’s Empowerment session at #SEEP2018, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the WEinSPIRE partnership platform, talking through the actors, their incentives, and how the partnership model has been scaled. We’ll also be discussing a different partnership model for women’s empowerment, led by MEDA, and reflecting on how these initiatives fit into a broader development strategy for women’s empowerment.

This post was authored by Muhammad Junaid, chief of party of the USAID Punjab Enabling Environment Project (PEEP), and Frenki Kozeli, a manager on Chemonics’ Economic Growth and Trade Practice.