Our Signature Tools embody our most effective strategies to empower people to succeed in the global economy. Our diverse tools help projects communicate behavior change, strengthen individual capacity, facilitate collective action, locate value chain opportunities, foster smallholder growth, determine market return, parlay farms into businesses, evaluate risk and open credit, and boost farmers’ profitability, among others. By helping practitioners meet the unique challenges of the markets and communities in which they operate, these tools result in more successful and sustainable projects.
Thinking and Working Politically in Systems Development Toolkit (“TWP Toolkit”)
ACDI/VOCA integrates thinking and working politically (TWP) into our inclusive market systems (IMS) approach to development in a way that facilitates system-level changes that are politically smart and feasible. TWP is a development approach that stresses the importance of understanding the local context (“thinking politically”) to create sustainable change (“working politically”) and acknowledges that desired outcomes are heavily influenced by local interests, values, power dynamics, and motivations. TWP recognizes the power politics have on which technical approaches work and which do not.
DecidoSer
DecidoSer (“I Decide to Be”) is a psychosocial support tool and methodology that promotes reconciliation and social change by promoting greater trust, dialogue, empowerment, and respect within families and communities. It is a tool that helps to change narratives for disadvantaged communities and is rooted in the philosophy that the change we want to see starts with us.
Private Sector Engagement Toolkit
ACDI/VOCA’s partnerships with the private sector promote nutrition and food security, enhance income generation, support gender equality and social inclusion, and address environmental sustainability challenges in communities around the world. In order to create these transformative partnerships, ACDI/VOCA developed an initial suite of tools.
End Market Analysis Toolkit
The EMA Toolkit provides practical guidance and templates for planning, designing, and implementing high-quality End Market Analyses that can be adapted to fit project’s unique needs and objectives.
CLA Playbook
Our CLA Playbook provides practical resources, tips, and tools to help project teams collaborate, learn, and adapt in more systematic and intentional ways.
Systems Diagnostic
The Systems Diagnostic was designed to help make sense of how systems function and to identify factors that provide high areas of leverage for broader systems change.
Gender First
Ensuring equal access to productive resources and economic decisions can significantly increase yields and enable families to allocate more income to food, health, and children. GenderFirst identifies interventions in households, markets, enterprises, and community groups to ensure equitable benefits for all people. GenderFirst empowers all people – both women and men – to succeed in the global economy.
Sell More For More
Smallholder farmers have difficulty accessing markets due to limited product volume and inconsistent quality. Belonging to a well-managed group can link farmers to these markets. Sell More For More (SMFM) empowers farmer cooperatives and aggregators to develop marketing plans and meet buyer specifications. SMFM develops the capacity of these groups to sell more product for more income.
M4
M4 empowers farmer-based organizations (FBOs) to assess their performance and to identify improvements along the four areas of membership, marketing, money, and management. Many assessments are complicated, expensive, and not directly meaningful to FBO leaders. The M4 assessment provides an open and transparent process for members to quickly reach consensus on their priorities.
