BRiTEN (Building Rural Incomes Through Entrepreneurship) is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing incomes and improving livelihoods through development initiatives that are designed to enhance business competitiveness and access to goods and services by the rural poor. In order to do this, we work on bringing about a paradigm shift among the rural communities in conceiving of their livelihoods as going beyond providing for the family’s subsistence needs and moving into a business-minded frame of mind that harnesses competitive advantage.

Our approach is in understanding the market system and understanding how to bring about a large-scale systemic change by addressing the underlying causes of the market failure with a commitment to ensuring that the value chains operate sustainably.   This approach is an inclusive pro- poor approach which address challenges from the systemic point of view.   We use the both the Livelihood and Making Markets Work for the Poor (M4PA) approaches which are inclusive and provide sustainability and are that are effective in reaching more people.. We work with the productive poor – women, men, young men and young women in rural areas to develop competitiveness that will lead to increased incomes and improved livelihoods.

We use the following principles in our approach

We generate evidence through the analysis of the value chain to identify first the constraints then the system constraints that are making the market system for the value chain not to work. We ensure that when we are making these assessments, we look at the different context from the men, women young men and young women’s views so that we can design projects that help them increase their incomes and improve their livelihoods.

We encourage innovation in the development of interventions that enable us to unlock the problem and to reach more people.

The interventions we design are designed to benefit many people

We then test those interventions and assess if they have the potential to unlock the market and if so we recommend a roll out to scale

We will then develop monitoring and knowledge management systems