This Toolkit for Value Chain Analysis and Market Development Integrating Climate Resilience and Gender Responsiveness aims to help countries in selecting and analyzing value chains for opportunities to improve climate change resilience and reduce gender inequalities. Key strengths of the value chain approach include assisting in adaptation planning, analysis of vulnerabilities and hotspots across a value chain, assessing risks at each node, identifying new market opportunities to help communities adapt, and suggesting partnerships in which there is mutual benefit from the implementation of the strategies. It’s important for policy makers, planners, project developers, technical advisors and implementers at local, regional or national level to take a holistic view of the entire food system.
At the same time, there is a need for accelerated implementation for achieving the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement, as well as a greater push for government-led ambition to do so. With 89 percent of countries identifying agriculture as a major priority sector in their NDCs, investing in adaptation of agriculture sectors is required. The NDC Global Outlook Report 2019 observes that agriculture is one of the greatest concerns in terms of vulnerability in the NDC sector. Agriculture plays a relevant role in mainstreaming the NDC process. However, progress in translating these efforts into budgets is still lacking (UNDP and UNFCCC, 2019). Key strengths of the value chain approach include assisting in adaptation planning, analysis of vulnerabilities and hotspots across a value chain, assessing risks at each node, identifying new market opportunities to help communities adapt, and suggesting partnerships in which there is mutual benefit from the implementation of the strategies. This toolkit intends to provide policy makers, planners, project developers, technical advisors and implementers at local, regional or national level, with good practices of climate-resilient and gender-responsive value chain development.1 It aims to act as a repository of relevant tools and methodologies for identifying relevant stakeholders and engaging with them to collect data and analyse it to design interventions. Climate change threatens agricultural value chains and having a genderresponsive value chain approach is useful in analysing the climate risks, as it looks at stages during and beyond production, while using a more systemic approach to risk management.
