STEP UP's vision is to foster a significant increase in practitioners' capacities to assist large numbers of the ultra poor to move out of extreme poverty.
Member Spotlight
Luckshmi Sivalingam works in DAI’s Economic Growth sector, where she focuses on inclusive economic growth, access to finance, and pro-poor agriculture value chain development. She also currently manages DAI’s agriculture and health linkages practice. She was recently named 2012 Practitioner of the Year by SEEP for her leadership and valuable contributions within STEP-UP and other learning initiatives.
Webinars
Please join SEEP’s Market Facilitation (MaFI) Working Group and Strengthening the Economic Potential of the Ultra Poor (STEP UP) Initiative for a series of webinars on the recently launched “Integrating Very Poor Producers Into Value Chains Field Guide.” The first two webinars were held in November 2012 and February 2013 and the recordings can be found below:
- Webinar 1: Key considerations for integrating the very poor into value chains
- Webinar 2: Innovative strategies for facilitating vertical linkages with very poor producers
The third and final webinar will be held on May 23, 2013 at 9 AM EDT. For more information including how to join, please click here.
Step Up Resources
Browse 145 Products/Tools/Training Materials You Selected:
by Christopher Dunford
Login or Create an account to download the pdfIt is widely acknowledged that the very poor need more than microfinance to address the causes and conditions of their poverty. Ideally, the poor would have access to a coordinated combination of microfinance services and other development services to improve business, income and assets, health, nutrition, family planning, education of children, social support networks, and so on. The question is how to ensure a “coordinated combination” of appropriate services, especially in rural communities and other communities where multiple services are simply unavailable.… Read More ›
by Poverty Outreach Working Group
Login or Create an account to download the pdfThis report summarizes the main issues raised during the e-consultation, “Economic-Strengthening Pathways for the Bottom Billion: Connecting the Dots,” sponsored by Poverty Outreach Working Group of The SEEP Network, May 17–19, 2011. A complete transcript of the discussion is available at http://tinyurl.com/2011econsult.
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by Jan Maes and Kajal Vekaria
Login or Create an account to download the pdfIn the year 2000, the United Nations created the Millennium Declaration based on the principles of freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature, and shared responsibility, with a resolution to 'halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion... … Read More ›
by Jan P. Maes
Login or Create an account to download the pdfThis case study describes Trickle Up’s collaboration with W.O.M.E.N., a small Cambodian NGO that provides home health care services and health education to slumdwellers affected by HIV/AIDS in Phnom Penh. As part of a two-year pilot project,funded by the Elton John Aids Foundation, Trickle Up has provided $100 seed capital grants to families in W.O.M.E.N.’s home health care program to start or expand microenterprises.
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by Gaamaa Hishigsuren
Login or Create an account to download the pdfActivists for Social Alternatives (ASA) commenced operations in 1986 in Tamil Nadustate as a facilitating agent to empower the poor dalit women. ASA’s objective is to alleviate poverty and enhance the standard of living for rural poor women, dalits, landless labourers, smalland marginal farmers on a sustained basis towards achieving a better socio-economic and political status by meeting their credit and savings needs for income generation activities,agriculture, and entrepreneurial ventures. After having seen a success in intermediating micro-financial services as one of its core activities and received a significant demand from the target poor around Tamil Nadu state, ASA decided to scale up. That is, ASA has set a goal to reach100,000 members by 2005 and 200,000 members by 2010. More details on the country contextas well as the origin, present status and future goals of ASA are discussed in the next sections.
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by Microlinks
An activity under STRIVE, the Afghanistan Secure Futures (ASF) initiative enhanced economic opportunities for youth in Afghanistan by targeting youth apprentices. The program had two key components: increase the number and diversity of contracts for enterprises—primarily workshops in the construction sector—who employ youth apprentices, and improve working conditions and learning opportunities for those youth. The latter included a critical literacy training component as well as a workplace safety component.… Read More ›
by Aude de Montesquiou, Jaya Sarkar, Jan Maes
Negotiating your way out of poverty is like a life-long or even intergenerational challenge, where any small movement out of poverty can be undone by an illness in the family or a natural disaster. Many of the tools of pro-poor economic growth are meant to help prevent a family from going down, soften the blow from setbacks or even provide ways out of poverty.
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by Anna Cuny Garloch
The value chain approach aims to achieve economic growth with poverty reduction, but there tends to be a poverty ‘frontier’ beyond which value chain development programs struggle to engage. This briefing paper presents some emerging guidance around how value chain development can explicitly ‘pull’ the very poor into markets in gainful ways. It highlights program design strategies, examples of adapting value chain development principles, the importance of appropriately sequencing program interventions, as well as some key challenges when working with the very poor.… Read More ›
by Ben Fowler
This toolkit aims to equip value chain development programmers to design effective interventions that reach and impact the very poor. It profiles tools that are applicable in the value chain selection and value chain analysis phases of a project, as well as assessment tools that can be used throughout the project cycle. Despite the many tools available to guide value chain selection and value chain analysis, and to conduct specialized assessments, these tools are not currently designed for explicit application with the very poor. This toolkit is a compilation of tools that can be used for situation assessments, value chain selection and value chain analysis. Discussion of each individual tool includes a brief description, how it is applicable (or adaptable) to reaching the very poor in the context of a value chain development program, brief examples of how each tool can be applied and used to inform programming decisions, and references.… Read More ›
by S. Annim
Over time, while some countries have experienced trends of poverty and inequality moving in the same direction, others have witnessed the two developmental issues panning out in opposite directions. The latter is observed in Ghana, where in the last two decades poverty has been reducing and consumption inequality is on the ascendency. … Read More ›
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