PATHWAYS AND PURSESTRINGS  - (2008 to 2011)

 

Location within Country
Sindh, Punjab, KPK

Name of Associated Agencies
CIDA and MEDA Pakistan

Others: Pakistan Social Welfare Society (PSWS), Haleeb Foods Limited, Kaarvan Crafts, Sarhad Rural Support Programme (SRSP)


Context

The Pathways and Pursestrings: Market Access for Women Producers in Pakistan (P&P: MAWPP) project is a market-led initiative to promote women's economic empowerment and facilitate their effective integration into profitable, mainstream markets. It emulates the successes of Behind the Veil (BtV), a three-year project jointly implemented by ECDI and MEDA in 2004, which created sustainable micro-enterprises for over 9000 women through a network of mobile women intermediaries (known as Sales Agents). Sales Agents provided quality inputs, market knowledge and access, and the project was successful in terms of numbers, social impact, increased incomes, and influence on women’s lives.
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Objectives of the project

The P&P project aims to provide isolated rural women producers with sustainable linkages and support services that will enable them to access markets with products demanded by contemporary consumers in four subsectors, that is, dairy, embroidery, bangles and seedlings in the marginalized and impoverished areas of Sindh, NWFP, Baluchistan and Punjab (provinces of Pakistan). It hopes to achieve scale by developing the capacity of select Pakistani organizations to understand the principles and theories of value chain development and to apply it to a range of industrial, demographic and geographic contexts across Pakistan.
 

ECDI’S Primary role in the project

ECDI enhanced the KFPs’ capacity to take on leadership roles in women’s economic advancement and poverty reduction through gender responsive approaches to value chain analysis, through a comprehensive package of workshops, resource materials, trainings, mentoring, etc. ECDI and KFPs worked together throughout the life of the program, sharing learning and expertise, thereby ensuring long-term sustainability and ongoing impact. This was accomplished through a system for action learning and knowledge dissemination operating as an iterative ‘learning loop’, This learning continuum incorporated the latest global theoretical knowledge being localized, delivered and supplemented with grassroots innovations and practical challenges resulting from project implementation in diverse sub-sectors across Pakistan.