Mid-term performance evaluation of the strengthening value chains (SVC) activity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The SVC mid-term performance evaluation sought to identify achievements, performance issues, and constraints, focusing on SVC’s collaboration with Food for Peace (FFP) and, from this, to identify a set of actionable recommendations to achieve activity goals and objectives for the short, medium, and long-term. Activity interventions contributed to the increased adoption of improved production and post-harvest practices and increased production, quality, and sales, and to a lesser extent increased market linkages, in the dried bean and coffee VCs. SVC’s gender activities further contributed to the increased adoption of gender practices and gender outcomes by small farmers and their POs. However, numerous challenges remain in the targeted VCs, chief among them the lack of access to quality inputs and finance, lack of horizontal and vertical market linkages, and weak capacity of farmer producer organizations (POs). SVC has struggled to achieve an integrated “one-team” approach with the FFP Development Food Security Activities (DFSAs) owing to, among other things, different intervention priorities, contractual restrictions, weak intra-project communication, and poor synchronization of implementation timelines. The evaluation offers nine primary recommendations and 25 sub-recommendations for USAID/DRC related to staffing and management, capacity building, access to inputs, access to finance, market diversification, strengthening the enabling environment, inter-project coordination, gender, youth, and social engagement, and strengthening VC best practices.