How MSME value chains condition climate resilience of vulnerable households and farms in Africa and Asia

Climate change and shocks batter African and Asian farming households. They look for and do many things to be climate resilient – to manage ex ante these shocks and cope ex post. While the private sector’s role in helping these households become climate resilient is under debate, do you know that at least 90-95% of the ‘private sector’ and the ‘markets’ faced by small farms in these regions are actually operated by micro-, small-, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), with the rest 5-10%, by big companies?

In this webinar we explored how the MSME value chains focused on domestic markets (outputs, inputs, and services) help households and farms address impacts of climate change.

The findings from a recently completed paper show surprisingly strong and interesting roles of these value chains in conditioning resilience of the vulnerable. Our policy messages are, we feel, unconventional – public investments in roads, electricity, and wholesale markets enabling value chain development, anti-bribe policies and other measures reducing transaction costs for the value chains to develop, are crucial and even central to pro-climate resilience policies and deserve a major place in climate policy debates.