4-7 November: Members of Prosperity Initiative's Strategy and Provincial Multi-Sector teams led a value chain training workshop with members of Ben Tre's Provincial People's Committee.

This on-the-job training is an important first step in Prosperity Initiative's partnership with Ben Tre province, our main government partner in our Coconut sector work. In August, Ben Tre was selected as the first province Prosperity Initiative will collaborate with to develop a multi-sector portfolio, with Coconuts as the lead sector.

The main purpose of the workshop was to provide provincial staff working on the Coconut sector with conceptual and practical experience on value chain analysis. Since the Ben Tre project will be co-implemented by Prosperity Initiative and Ben Tre, this exercise helped build capacity and strengthen our relationship after signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the province in September 2008.

Dr. Martin F. Albani, Head of Prosperity Initiative's Provincial Multi-sector Development programme, and Fred Levitan, Prosperity Initiative's Strategy Manager, conducted activities like value chain mapping and sector scanning. Participants learned how to structure questionnaires and practiced techniques on interviewing various actors in the field in the Coconuts supply chain.

"It was a highly interactive practical workshop emphasising learning-by-doing," Dr. Albani said. "The aim was to gather actual value chain information results while conducting the workshop as opposed to a more academic training seminar, which might have been expected in the first place."

"I'm very happy that we accomplished this," Albani said. "It's the only way towards building sustainable capacity."

In 2009, the same Team plans on conducting benchmarking study tours with their partners with an equally hands-on and collaborative approach throughout the planning, briefing, execution and debriefing phases of field work in target markets.