What does it take to move from a successful pilot to a genuinely sustainable, replicable model? In Ukraine's agrifood sector, we are beginning to find out — and the Regional Development Agency (RDA) is at the heart of that journey.
The context matters — and so does the trap it sets. Ukraine is a country at war. Its women smallholder farmers are navigating displacement, shattered supply chains, and the daily reality of conflict. When services for farmers disappear or fail, the instinct is to fill the gap: fund a training programme, subsidise a provider, deliver the service yourself. It feels helpful. But donor-subsidised provision, if it crowds out or delays the emergence of locally-funded alternatives, can be one of the most effective ways to prevent a market system from ever developing. We often end up on a treadmill of urgency – it’s constantly moving and hard to get off. This is the trap we are trying to avoid in the Empower AgriWomen Project. Our mandate as a market systems facilitator is to strengthen the system so that local actors deliver services sustainably, and without us over the long term.
What we built in Chernihiv
Women smallholder farmers in Ukraine face compounding disadvantages. This includes limited access to technical and business skills, extension services that have been hollowed out, and a reliance on donor-funded provision that is structurally fragile. These are not problems that another short-term training programme can solve. That trap is self-baiting. We need to build the capacity of local institutions to deliver demand-led, affordable services — independently and over time. We are working to build something that lasts.
Our partnership with the Regional Development Agency (RDA) of Chernihiv Oblast is built around a clear theory of change that can spring the trap - build RDA’s institutional capacity to develop and deliver technical and entrepreneurship skills training to women farmers and test a business model that does not depend on perpetual external subsidy. The initiative centres on three elements designed to unlock the cage from the inside: a Women’s Agribusiness Support Office providing mentoring and peer learning; an Accelerator platform that integrates training into real production processes; and evidence-based research on the actual needs of women farmers — because any sustainable service model must be demand-led, not supply-pushed.
Swisscontact’s role is to co-design and test services with RDA, strengthen internal training capacity, and stress-test financing models (such as cost-sharing arrangements with entrepreneurs) that could underpin long-term viability. Independent experts are engaged as associates of RDA, with fees paid by RDA, not the project. That is a deliberate choice: it keeps Swisscontact out of the system and puts the commercial relationship where it belongs.
How we see the pathway to sustainability
Once the subsidy becomes the business model, it is almost impossible to remove without the whole thing collapsing. Escaping the trap requires a viable business model where the costs of service delivery are covered by revenues, institutional mandates, or a mix of both. In the short term, training fees for the least-endowed farmers are subsidised to build the evidence base. As demand is demonstrated, RDA is turning the key from the inside, progressively self-financing and drawing on its own infrastructure and relationships. The results chain is straightforward: build RDA’s capacity - RDA delivers demand-led, affordable services - women entrepreneurs access services and benefit – resulting in improved practices, productivity, and market access. Each step is upstream of the next. The project’s exit is built in from the start.
It’s about picking the lock carefully and sliding the latch quietly because donor funding cycles will not last forever. What will last is a local institution with the skills, the model, and the motivation to keep delivering services to women farmers — regardless of what the external funding environment looks like.
How we can replicate successes
The Chernihiv partnership is generating learning we are capturing and sharing — for our move into Kyiv region, and for the wider community working on agricultural service delivery in conflict-affected contexts. Practically we are discovering how to structure cost-sharing; and how to keep services demand-led when farmers’ needs are shifting fast under conflict, displacement, and climate pressure. Systemically we are generating evidence about real demand for skills provision — evidence that, if compelling, should attract other providers into the market. The model has truly escaped the trap when it spreads without us.
That is the bar we are now aiming to reach with our new partnership with RDA in Kyiv region. The Chernihiv experience has given us a tested model and a partner with real institutional knowledge. The question now is, can that model travel? Can an RDA in a different regional context, with different stakeholder relationships and a different economic landscape, take the blueprint and make it their own?
We believe they can, but we are not taking it for granted. Our role in the Kyiv region will now be more facilitative still — shorter learning curves, faster service design cycles, and an immediate focus on financing and evidence. We are not starting from scratch; we are bringing the learning with us.
“Replication is the ultimate test of a market systems approach. If others don’t adopt it without us, we haven’t created systemic change — we’ve created a project.”
Replication, in market systems terms, is not copy-paste. It means the evidence is compelling enough (and the business model clear enough) that other actors choose to adopt it on their own terms, with their own resources. It’s the final trap test. Our work in Chernihiv is helping us to understand how to avoid the trap and work as a systems facilitator in this context, now work in Kyiv will take us further.
The Empower AgriWomen Project is implemented by Swisscontact as a market systems development initiative. Swisscontact’s approach is grounded in the conviction that sustainable change requires strengthening the systems and institutions around target populations, not substituting for them.