Agriculture is critical tothe overall development and transformation of Odisha. With crops covering 35 per cent of the state’s geographical area and more than 60 per cent of its workforce depending on farming for livelihood, the welfare of Odisha’s people cannot be separated from its agriculture. The State Government is keen to increase agricultural production and raise incomes and productivity by leveraging science and technology, improving resource use efficiency, diversifying to high value agriculture and supporting efficient functioning of agricultural markets.

The Value chain tool kit provides methods to support male and female farmers in the “Build to Grow to Prosper” phases of the CRS Pathway to Prosperity (Figure 1). Through this work CRS is striving to achieve industry leadership in value chain service delivery and influence that is gender-sensitive. Value chain programming is now synonymous with agricultural development and CRS aims to adopt this approach across our project portfolio.

This toolkit intends to provide policy makers, planners, project developers, technical advisors and implementers at local, regional or national level, with good practices of climate-resilient and gender-responsive value chain development.1 It aims to act as a repository of relevant tools and methodologies for identifying relevant stakeholders and engaging with them to collect data and analyse it to design interventions. Climate change threatens agricultural value chains and having a genderresponsive value chain approach is useful in analysing the climate risks, as it looks at stages during and beyond production, while using a more systemic approach to risk management.