Identifying Market Opportunities for Rural Smallholder Producers

This guide is the third in a series designed to support agencies implementing a Participatory approach to rural agroenterprise development. These guides are designed for use by service providers in assisting farmer groups and local entrepreneurs within a community or “area” to develop skills in agroenterprise development. The aim of this guide is to provide a simple and systematic participatory method for gathering market information to identify products and services for agroenterprise development. This approach enables local producers to undertake market studies and identify investment options based on their local knowledge and on market demand, rather than relying on pre-selected products that have been decided by external experts. The starting point for this guide is an analysis of the client group and the establishment of a research team to identify new market opportunities. This process enables service providers and farmers to take a fresh look at their existing production portfolio and also to explore options for diversification based on the agronomic, marketing and financial merits of selected products. The main output of the work from this guide is a “short list” of prioritized demand-based market opportunities. This list of products will be reviewed by farmer groups to select a product (or products) for immediate investment in the case of existing products, or for more detailed market analysis leading towards the development of new agroenterprise opportunities.