LightCastle Partners Conducts Primary Research for a Multi-thematic Market Systems Assessment

Figure 1. LightCastle team conducting a Focus Group Discussion with women participants on Chili

LightCastle Partners has recently conducted primary data collection for a comprehensive Gender and Environment Sensitive Market Assessment across 20+ unions of Dewanganj, Islampur, Jamalpur Sadar, and Melandah subdistricts in Jamalpur. This is part of LightCastle’s data collection phase of a market system assessment study commissioned by World Vision, onboarded in November 2023. 

The programme focuses on Rice, Maize, Mustard, Chili, Eggplant, and Leafy Greens value chains with a cross-cutting theme of women empowerment. The data collection phase, spanning four sub-districts, has been geared towards discovering the challenges, scopes, and opportunities in agriculture for smallholder farmers, particularly for women. The climatic and environmental risks revolving around the value chains were also taken into consideration during the diagnostic phase.  

LightCastle’s field team collected both quantitative and qualitative data encompassing 320+ household surveys, 18 in-depth interviews, 80+ key informant interviews, and 25+ focus group discussions. Smallholder farmer households, lead farmers, and machinery service providers at the grass-roots level; along with agri-input retailers/dealers, local agro-processors, traders, wholesalers, and stockists at the market level were part of the respondent pool. Systems-level representatives from government agencies, NGOs, financial institutions, and corporations were also consulted.

The Gender Inclusive Market Systems for Improved Nutrition (GESMIN) is one of the major projects of World Vision Bangladesh, which will be implemented in the four sub-districts of Jamalpur by working directly with 1,000 groups of commercial smallholder male & female producers (800 existing Producer Groups from a previous project and 200 new ones).

The project will contribute to increasing the Smallholder farming households’ income, improving nutritional status, and empowering women economically by adopting an inclusive market system approach for the targeted farming households in four sub-districts of Jamalpur, Bangladesh by June 2028.

Following on as Phase II from the 6-year Nutrition-Sensitive Value Chains for Smallholder Farmers (NSVC) Project, it aims to increase income, improve nutrition and economic empowerment for 25,000 smallholder farmers’ (in particular for women) households from 2023-2028, and also working to sustain the outcomes of existing intervention areas, while scaling up to new areas.