Training on 5Capitals-G

From 20-24 April 2016, a training on 5Capitals-G – a gender-responsive tool for assessing the poverty impacts of value chain development – brought together researchers from Bioversity International and partners working on gender-equitable value chain development in different parts of India: the College of Forestry (Karnataka), Action for Social Advancement (ASA, Madhya Pradesh), and the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF, Tamil Nadu). The objectives of the training were: 1) to understand the relevance of an asset-based approach to poverty reduction; 2) to gain capacity to assess value chain development outcomes and impacts at household and enterprise levels; 3) to embrace the importance of a gender focus and gain capacity in collecting and analyzing gender-differentiated data; and 4) to understand the contextual factors shaping the outcomes and impacts of value chain development.

The original version of 5Capitals (Donovan & Stoian 2012) is an approach to evaluate the critical livelihood assets of households as well as the business assets of enterprises linking smallholder farmers with downstream business partners. The tool can be used to establish a baseline and assess the impact of value chain development on poverty. Bioversity International and ICRAF are currently developing a gender-responsive version of the tool (5Capitals-G) to determine gender-differentiated access to and control over household and enterprise assets and related outcomes of value chain development in terms of gender equity.

The training course focused on a prototype version of 5Capitals-G that will be field tested in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and possibly Tamil Nadu. In Karnataka, the value chain development initiative focuses on three locally valued forest-gathered fruit species: Garcinia indica (kokum), Mangifera indica (mango), and Garcinia gummi-gutta (Malabar tamarind). The tool draws due attention to sustainability issues in harvesting in addition to opportunities for livelihoods and smallholder business development with a gender lens.

This training was implemented as part of the Innovations in Ecosystem Management and Conservation (IEMaC) project with support from the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM), and in collaboration with an IFAD and EU funded project ‘Linking agrobiodiversity value chains, climate adaptation and nutrition: Empowering the poor to manage risk’ executed by Bioversity International in India. The IEMaC project is funded by the InFoRM (Innovations in Forest Resource Management) program of USAID which aims to reduce forest degradation in India, with co-funding from the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (FTA).