As the agricultural market in Bangladesh has grown, customers have become more discerning of product quality. We’ve seen the emergence of more organic and ‘pure’ products – supporting healthier ecosystems, sustainable livelihoods and fair trade.

But for many rural poor producers, particularly women, access to fair trade markets is controlled by a complex chain of middlemen, who control the aggregation, processing and retailing parts of the value chain. So, farmers traditionally have lacked the opportunity to experiment with higher quality products.

WBCs, as Social Enterprise Cooperatives, seek to provide answers to the needs of a whole community – not just members as in the traditional cooperative model. WBCs work up and down the value chain to benefit producers, processors and consumers.

WBCs play a vital role in improving the socio-economic status of members and local communities, through creating supply power – giving farmers more control of the supply, allowing them to exert greater pressure on aggregators and middlemen to pay a good price.