Rural households in Ukraine are faced with lack of employment opportunity and low income basically due to lower actual production than potential capacity, higher input cost and lower return on the outputs. Improved production technology, processing of products, increased bargaining power through large scale purchase of inputs and sale of outputs are some of the solutions. Unfortunately, the rural households, individually, are unable to beat the market forces because of their miniscule size in the local agrarian economy. Experience indicates that the rural households can ameliorate their condition through collective action. Together they can become a major actor in the local economy. For this purpose, they need to learn about these market forces and use them jointly to make these forces in their favour. Under its ‘rural economic development (RED)’ component, CBA-III tries to address these issues.

Rural economic development (RED) component CBA-III promotes non-profit multi-functional agricultural service cooperatives (ASCs) for creating employment and income opportunities in rural areas. It targets low-income households and assists them in getting organized into ASC and in bringing added value to local products through efficient production, packaging and shared marketing.

Objective of CBA Project is to promote small businesses in rural area with a purpose to raise employment and income opportunities. To this end, it aims enhance capacity of rural low-income households by enabling them to get organised into agricultural service cooperative, generate capital, learn skill and carry out a series of production, processing, marketing and service related activities.

To achieve its objective, CBA Project has initiated piloting its model of cooperation in the framework of rural economic development component of CBA-III.

CBA support includes training and advisory, institutional capacity building and micro-grant based on cost sharing with cooperatives and local/regional authorities. Experience of the pilot will be documented for further use and will beavaible in Project’s Progress Reports