On Wednesday, August 21, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) was an integral part of a virtual dialogue that brought together different representatives from Latin America to discuss value chains and territorial development. This space for exchange included the participation of directors and work teams from foundations, companies, and business institutes, as well as Business Development Centers that the Technical Cooperation Service of the State of Chile finances to support the development of micro and small businesses throughout the country.
The event was opened by Andrés Chaur, RedEAmérica’s positioning coordinator, who welcomed the more than 130 participants from across the region. He also highlighted the value of sharing experiences and knowledge at the Latin American level, in order to improve practices in territorial productive development, which will also allow participants to identify various opportunities to strengthen value chains in each territory.
RedEAmérica is a network of companies, foundations and organizations from Latin America and the Caribbean that promotes private social investment for sustainable development and poverty reduction in the region. Through alliances and collaborative strategies, it fosters social transformation and the strengthening of communities.
Sandra Hernández, executive director of RedEAmérica, stressed the importance of this type of initiative to strengthen the links between small and medium-sized entrepreneurs and large companies. “Latin America faces a crucial challenge in strengthening value chains from the private sector, as well as generating these links with small, medium-sized, and micro-entrepreneurs and companies that sponsor business foundations in the region,” said Hernández, highlighting the need to improve collaboration between economic actors in the region.
The dialogue began with an analysis by Marco Dini, economic affairs officer of ECLAC’s Productive and Business Development Division, who pointed out that territorial development must focus on taking advantage of local competitive advantages to generate economic growth. “Each territory has the potential to generate collective goods and specific competitive advantages that benefit the actors in the territory and that cannot be generated in any other way than by working in the territory. To transform these potentialities, productive development policies and programs must be established that start from the territory and that are capable of using its potentialities to transform them into tangible collective goods,” said Dini.
Similarly, he explained that the concept of territory does not only refer to something physical, but that in order to carry out this associative work it is necessary to conceive it as a concept with four dimensions, in addition to the physical space, the actors, social capital and knowledge must be considered.
Representatives from SERCOTEC, Fundemex, and ARCOR also presented specific cases of how their organizations have addressed territorial productive development through value chains. María José Becerra, General Manager of SERCOTEC, presented the institution’s strategic axes and stressed the importance of insertion in short value chains as a strategic niche to boost business.
For their part, Ariel Tortti from the Argentine social enterprise CODE and Mónica Camisassu from Arcor shared experiences focused on private social investment as a driver for productive inclusion in Argentina. Likewise, Jimena Fernández, general director of the Foundation for Entrepreneurship in Mexico (Fundemex), presented the work carried out by the organization to link, articulate, train and intervene in value chains with the support of Mexican entrepreneurs.
Carolina Durán, director of Building Markets, shared the work they do to find small businesses, train them and connect them with large markets. On the other hand, Cristian Durán, regional director of SERCOTEC, Los Ríos Region, detailed the regional productive initiative “I buy local”, a public-private alliance that seeks to generate concrete actions in order to open permanent marketing channels to smaller companies and which seeks to ensure that SMEs that are advised can have formal and constant marketing channels.
The dialogue identified opportunities to replicate successful projects in the region and strengthen collaboration between Latin American countries. In addition, the work of ECLAC in encouraging cooperation through the Cluster Initiatives Platform and Other Territorial Productive Articulation Initiatives (IAPT) that seek to promote territorial productive development was highlighted.
The event concluded with a call to continue these dialogues and advance in the implementation of collaborative projects that promote territorial economic productive development in Latin America.
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