This expert post comes from USAID/MD office Enterprise Development Advisor Jason Wolfe.

Those of us interested in the economic welfare and security of young people have a bewildering array of interventions and approaches to consider. While each has its own advocates and critics, tremendous amounts of confusion seem to swirl around one in particular: “livelihoods.” For those that know it very well (and I don’t claim to be one of them), it unleashes a whole new way of understanding the people we care about and putting their needs and perspectives at the center of our work. For the rest of us, it’s yet another ambiguous and empty piece of development jargon. I’ve come to better appreciate its advantages and disadvantages, particularly with respect to another approach that I do know well: the value chain approach.

On the basis of themes emerging in current debates on rural development in Latin America, this paper develops an analytical framework for analyzing rural livelihoods in terms of their sustainability and their implications for rural poverty.