Food supply chains are extremely important for food access and livelihoods across Africa, but their role is often overlooked and underappreciated. Under normal conditions, the gap between myth and reality can result in the design of policies and programs with limited or negative impacts on food security and welfare. The shock of COVID‐19 has heightened this disconnect, with potentially dire consequences for food security.
Many development agencies are designing and implementing socially-inclusive agricultural interventions at the level of the value chain—covering multiple stages and different types of actors. Monitoring and evaluating the success of these value chain interventions require tools that can track the empowerment of and identify the constraints facing the women and men who participate across multiple stages of the value chain.