I enjoyed reading SEEP’s draft analysis and provide here six questions and comments for later discussion, per Mary’s request:
1. There are issues concerning the language of business vs the language of development theory. Consultants should be able to serve as facilitators between local NGOs and external markets, particularly in the areas of regulation and payments, requiring specific sector experience.
2. Do the participants understand the needs and vulnerabilities of the individual business owner. When livelihoods are on the line, what risks are the entrepreneur or micro-business owner asked to assume?
3. Clustering dynamics in an urban setting often depend on time/space considerations, particularly in service industries. Spatial propinquity is essential in many clustering strategies.
4. Marketing linkages and sell-through are critical. Does anyone have examples of the uses of receivables financing and American factoring?
5. Competitiveness practices often uses clustering or the resulting trade group for export promotion and distribution. One question is the degree of intervention and subsidy on the demand side of the value chain to formalize the platform for sell-buy linkages.
6. Partnering with large urban businesses in supplier training initiatives and procurement policies to locally-sourced services has been effective in the tourism trade. What other urban sectors show promise? The discussion should include some in-depth examples of the value chain analysis process in specific industries.
3 Comments
laguage of biz and development theory
i sincerely agree with alvin on the fact that consultant should serve as facilitators to the markets and organisation, more to it, since consultants are experienced person, expert in such chosen field their reasons faculties wealth of experiences, is needed more for the organisations to make decisions. because consultants are more closer to the markets and should be contacted by organisations for specific market info, needed for their development scenerios.
Just a few comments...
... on Alvin’s post:
ad 4: Factoring seems to be quite a common practice for small firms, at least in some countries. I’ve recently co-edited a book where our author on small business finance emphasised just this, see attachment.
ad 5: It’s definitely interesting and useful to explore the relationship between spatial clustering and integration of producers into value chains. In my view, the main advantage of the value chain perspective is that it directs the attention to buyers and markets, and helps to overcome an exaggerated locality focus. From a practical angle, VC promotion seems to work particularly well when (a) buyers are involved early on and (b) they follow a clear business and market logic, rather than operating with subsidies.
ad 6: We should explore the experiences that organisations like UNCTAD had with business linkage promotion — a different terminology, but an approach that is very close to the urban value chains that we are talking about here.
While discussing the
While discussing the linkage between urban development strategies/initaitves and the value chain approach, it might be useful to explore what impact workforce development can have in terms of linking the urban poor to productive markets. Alvin mentioned the idea of supplier training, which while useful is still tagrgeted towrads entrepreneurs. While soemwhat outside the core ambit of value chain analysis, from an urban development perspective, it will be useful to think of workforce development opportunties linked to research and development; design of products, services, or processes; production; marketing; distribution; and customer service.
To that end, it is really necessary to understand how local business and industries can not only create jobs for skilled and semi-skilled labor but also enhance upgarde their skills.
Do we have any large scale example of such inititaives that can be shared with the forum?
I think Tata Insitute of Social Sciences in Mumbai is working with the urban poor (mainly slumdwellers); a big HR firm as well as large shopping malls in Mumbai to train the young people as retail service personnel. floor and product representatives.
Does anyone know about similar intiatives in other urban slums?