Rebuilding the Enterprise
Ecosystem:
Rural Enterprise Network, Sri Lanka
The
world we live in today is marked by conflict. Ongoing conflicts -
religious, ethnic and geopolitical continue to endanger the most
vulnerable and destroy communities. Conflicts also severely disrupt
economic and social activity. The livelihoods of those who live in
former conflict zones take a hit, as the environment of the area has
been made unsuitable for economic prosperity or entrepreneurial
initiative.
Such
is the case of northern Sri Lanka, a region marred by the Sri Lankan
Civil War, which went on from the 1980s to the 2000s. Although the war
is no longer affecting the people and politics of the country on the
same scale as it did earlier, the economic activities of the region,
largely agriculture-based have not been able to recover, or to grow
beyond their limited potential. It is here that an organisation like the
Rural Enterprise Network (REN) is playing a key role in changing the
economic landscape for small food producers.
REN plays an important role in providing access to markets for these
rural food producers. Established in 2002, the network provides business
development services (BDS) to producers in the region by helping them
improve the quality of their produce and procure certifications of
quality, develop a common brand for the producers who are part of this
aggregation platform, forge market linkages and enable the transfer of
technology, therefore providing a package of services that individual
small producers would not have been able to access on their own.
The REN model has been tested and proven to power rural business in the
southern region of Sri Lanka. The endeavour is now to apply the same
approach to the conflict-affected northern region of the country. The
promotion of sustainable practices among farmers is also a key focus for
REN, as they help participating producers learn organic farming
techniques. Although their future plans involve a growth in scale,
aiming to reach 400 producers in northern Sri Lanka, the organisation’s
mission is to remain sustainable while also expanding. This stands as a
notable example for other aggregators and proves that profitability and
business viability by linking small rural producers to urban and
international markets can co-exist with practices to increase social
inclusion and sustainable practices which would have minimum impact on
the environment.
While
agri-business aggregators are not unheard of in India and the rest of
south Asia and the world, REN’s model stands out for its adherence to
sustainable practices even as it expands into a different geography,
aiming to grow even further and reach more producers, as well as its
drive to work in a former conflict zone, to re-build an economy where it
is needed the most. This intervention is an important one as it aims to
bring prominence and business viability to small producers in areas
where the institutional framework required to access bigger markets is
lacking.
The next steps that the Rural Enterprise Network plans to take include
partnerships with livelihood development programmes in the area to
increase their reach and scale and identification of new markets for
producers. Moving ahead, it is hoped that the Network provides an
example for other aggregators and agri-business interventions in the
region and that the entrepreneurship skills of the micro-businesses are
enhanced and access to markets provided, in such a way that they may
exhibit the potential to become local aggregators themselves, therefore
poised to impact even more lives. ■
Jayesha M. Koushik
jmkoushik@devalt.org
References
This article is based on a case study by
SEED, available at https://www.seed.uno/awards/all/2010/linking-small-scale-farmers-to-input-output-markets-through-rural-enterprise-network-ren.html#tabs1-supportneeds
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