Our Experience

Sunhara Prayas
India

Project Description:
The two-year Walmart Foundation-funded Sunhara Prayas project built on the success of the Sunhara Walmart project. It helped farmers develop better production and marketing systems. Operating in five districts of India’s Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, the initiative focused on empowering female fruit and vegetable farmers by addressing both market and social barriers that constrain economic opportunities.

Project Approach:
The Sunhara Prayas project engaged stakeholders at both ends of the value chain—from input suppliers and lenders to end-market buyers—to make the market system more efficient and beneficial for all. The project created opportunities for both women and men to sustainably benefit from increased production capacity, strengthened market linkages, and overall market system development.

Sunhara Prayas had two separate, but linked, streams of activities to maximize impact and conduct activities through a culturally sensitive approach. The project worked with women primarily in vegetable markets and with men in citrus and mango markets.

Impact and Accomplishments
The program emphasized empowering women through female-achieved, on-farm income gains and addressing barriers, both market and social, that restrict their ability to access and exercise control over economic opportunities. The program achieved this through four interlinked components:

• Group formation and strengthening to facilitate collaboration, access to finance, and market positioning
• Agricultural and enterprise extension and technical assistance for improved production and competitiveness
• Women’s empowerment activities to address gender inequities and barriers
• Market linkages among buyers, suppliers, and support service providers

Through the provision of technical assistance and trainings, the Sunhara Prayas project impacted 6,000 smallholder farmers, of whom over 80 percent are women.

» See also information about the Sunhara Walmart program.

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