Who decides where employment programmes anchor and how?

The answer matters. When programmes anchor too narrowly, they can expose workers and businesses to unnecessary risks.

In uncertain economies, a value-chain-agnostic approach can be a deliberate way to build more resilient jobs and incomes.

Turn on the news. Pick a side.

That is the demand of the moment. Across geopolitics, trade and global markets ambiguity has become suspect. To be undecided is to be seen as unserious. To avoid a clear position is taken as having none. Yet there is another kind of intellectual honesty. Agnosticism. The agnostic refuses to claim certainty where certainty is not warranted. This is not weakness but discipline.

A similar tension runs through employment programming. The pressure to anchor interventions in specific value chains is well-founded. Jobs emerge from firms. Firms compete in markets. Market structures matter. But in informal, fluid labour markets, repeatedly shaped by shocks, rigid anchoring risks designing for a world that workers themselves have learned not to rely on. Many people cannot afford the luxury of value chain loyalty. Work is combined, sequenced and reconfigured across activities, seasons and locations. Employment pathways are, by necessity, agnostic.

Anchoring employment in value chains

The ILO’s Value chain development for decent work shows that jobs tend to improve when workers are seen as part of business performance, not separate from it. When better wages, safer working conditions and more reliable jobs also help firms perform better, those improvements are more likely to last.

Many programmes follow this thinking by focusing employment support on specific value chains, and the attraction is understandable. Value chains make it easier to identify businesses, understand how they connect and address key problems. They also provide a practical way to work with the private sector and link employment goals to business incentives. This gives programmes a clear structure and a defined system for action.

But this approach can also lose sight of how people really earn a living. Many workers do not depend on a single crop or activity. They move between different kinds of work as opportunities change. As a result, programmes may only capture one part of how employment really works.

A value-chain agnostic lens

In rural Tanzania a young woman might spend one season working on maize farms, another selling vegetable and in between sell grains or take short-term work in a processing facility. Her income does not come from one crop or one job. Instead, she combines different activities as opportunities appear. This is common. Many workers move between different types of work: formal and informal jobs, farm and non-farm activities, and work close to home or in other locations. The real challenge is not finding work, but keeping income flowing across a year of shifting, varied work.

Some programmes use this as a starting point, focusing on how labour markets work. This shifts attention to how people find work, how businesses hire and manage workers, how people build and show their skills, and what prevents some groups from taking part in available opportunities.

SNV’s Opportunities for Youth Employment programme illustrates this, focusing on soft skills development, business support and job matching. It engages with broader labour and skills systems. Young people are connected to a wider range of local market opportunities, not channeled into a single pre-selected value chain.

Mercy Corps’ Rural Resilience Activity looked at how people found, and moved between, different kinds of work in agriculture throughout the year. Youth and women rarely stayed in one steady job linked to a single crop. Instead, they moved between different types of farm work as opportunities came up. Their choices were influenced by how employers hired workers, what employers expected and how the work fitted with family and other responsibilities. The programme focused on common challenges workers faced, helping them signal their skills and reliability more effectively across a range of jobs.

As a result, people benefited in different ways. Youth and women combined work from crops, livestock and different farming seasons, while also trading food and non-food products such as solar lights, home and personal care products. This helped them earn income more consistently. The lesson is that employment gains depend not only on value chains, but on how labour markets function across them. This reflects the framing in A rough guide to the MSD approach for youth employment in sub-Saharan Africa, which positions the labour market as a system in its own right, shaped by formal rules and informal norms across markets.

Grounded, not tethered

Agnostic anchoring is deliberate. Interventions remain anchored in firm demand, but the anchor shifts from individual commodities to the shared business constraints that shape hiring across multiple value chains. It starts with firm-level challenges that directly affect performance, such as high turnover, low productivity or unmet labour demand. These constraints often cut across activities within agricultural value chains, even if they do not extend in the same way to other sectors. Grounding interventions here keeps commercial logic intact while allowing employment gains to emerge across different roles and activities.

Improvements in work‑readiness signalling, retention or working conditions are reframed as firm‑level solutions - reducing costs, improving reliability or supporting productivity. It’s about competitiveness, not sector affiliation - a far more durable anchor for employers to stay engaged.

Sustaining that link to firm incentives is the central design challenge. When that link is clear, working across sectors does not dilute focus; it reflects how labour markets operate where workers and firms engage across multiple activities.

Rethinking the entry point

As labour market programmes continue to attract commitments from donors and implementers, these choices matter. Where we choose to anchor interventions, and how, shapes the kinds of employment outcomes we make possible.

Who decides where programmes anchor? Which constraints are genuinely rooted in specific value chains, and which reflect broader labour market dynamics that cut across sectors? When employment unfolds gradually across roles, activities and seasons, how should programmes balance short-term job creation with longer-term goals such as productivity, resilience and job quality?

These are technical design questions, and the realities are reflected in the systems we build.

For practitioners, this invites a shift in perspective - not away from value chains, but beyond them. The challenge is to design programmes that reflect how livelihoods are constructed, supporting not just jobs within systems, but the pathways people navigate across them.

If people construct their livelihoods through movement, programme design should support that movement — not get in its way.