MCC’s projects should attract the private sector, like commercial-scale farmers, who have already solved the problems of transitioning to high-value agriculture. Access to markets, finance, inputs, extension, and post-harvest services are necessary to support the transition to high-value agriculture. Even though MCC designed pieces of the Moldova project to address these areas, the evaluation found that they were not sufficient. According to the evaluation, limited access to attractive markets was consistently cited by farmers and other stakeholders as one of the main barriers to high-value agriculture adoption in the rehabilitated systems. Rather than relying primarily or only on donor interventions to connect farmers to markets, commercial-scale farmers could be attracted to invest and collaborate in the intervention areas. Project design should consider ways of involving the private sector, such as facilitating technical transfer from commercial-scale farmers to small-scale farmers.
Lesson Learned