We call it mapping

You are a farmer member of a group, an agro-processor. Or: you work in a project or a support institution such as an NGO. And you have plans to develop a business activity. But how to do this,

if you don’t know the “forces at work” well? Who can be your partners, and  also who will be your competitors? And there is even more to find out on both partners and competitors: Who does what? Who are the end consumers of which product? Who does the processing? Who sells what and how much to whom? Who are the “big players” and who are the “small players”? Who provides what services to whom? And so on, and so on.

iCRA is here to help you answer these important questions, and others, by always questioning the why of why, to find out who is who and who does what.  And what better way than to visualise this complexity than by mapping the direct and indirect actors and stakeholders of a value chain?

Using the idea of a map is meaningful, because thanks to this exercise you can situate yourself in a space, identify these partners and actors in a value chain, and understand how to link them to each other.

And, as the icing on the business cake, we will invite you to build this map with the other actors of the local sector, which will allow you to do several things at once: to know who is who, who works with whom, what are the major challenges of the sector, etc.

This so-called Actor mapping is part of our Making Agribusiness Work course. Come on board with us, and learn exactly how it works!

This iCRA expert bite is written by Cees Peter van den Brink, Making Agribusiness Work trainer at iCRA.