Dear colleagues,

Thank you so very much for your participation in this on-line conference on Urban Value Chain Development. Altogether, we had 38 people contributing to an interesting and seminal conversation. We very much appreciate you sharing your time and insight with us, and with each other. You’ve made some significant contributions to the Value Initiative’s learning agenda, including:

• What does urban development mean? Is it adding basic services and employment in urban areas or development of rural areas into urban like centers?
• The significance of rural-urban linkages to urban value chain development, and the challenges with layering a geographic boundary on value chains, which are defined essentially by business relationships.
• The importance of social networks to value chain development
• The opportunities for microenterprises to be involved in providing urban infrastructure, but the need to still hold governments accountable for representing and meeting the needs of the poor.
• Need for different groups of urban development communities of practice to understand the legitimacy of each others roles and complement each other for better program synergies.
• Need to recognize the important challenge of moving poor away from subsistence enterprises to growth oriented enterprises in order to integrate them into the formal economy.

Thank you for these valuable thoughts. I am also grateful to Linda Jones, Aly Miehlbrat and Sohini Sarkar for their expert perspectives.

We very much look forward to your continuing further dialogue on the open discussion space of the Enterprise Development Exchange: http://communities.seepnetwork.org/community/discussion

In addition, we hope this discussion has helped you consider your role in the Value Initiative. Requests for Application (RFAs) will be released the week of June 16 with a 3-4 week turnaround period.

You are also cordially invited to participate in the next on-line conference on Microenterprise and HIV: June 18-24, 2008. To join, send an e-mail to communities@seepnetwork.org .

I look forward to our next exchange,

Mary McVay
Director, The Value Initiative
The SEEP Network
708-660-8140
www.seepnetwork.org
http://edexchange.seepnetwork.org