Consulting firm specializing in competitiveness diagnostics through integrated value chain analysis.
Global Development Solutions, LLC, is a solutions-oriented consulting firm based in Reston, Virginia. Since its founding in 1999, the group has offered multiple capacities to provide strategic analysis and technical assistance to clients seeking solutions to market development and supply chain challenges in the global economy. Over the years the firm has earned a formidable reputation for delivering innovative guidance to clients seeking to formulate focused economic development strategies designed to overcome prevailing inefficiencies and bottlenecks that cause market and policy barriers, financial constraints, and technical challenges. The firm’s recommendations involve identifying best practice bridging across developing, emerging, and developed economies, and how best to integrate SMEs into global corporate networks.
For the past decade, GDS has assisted clients with:
• Value chain analysis
• Investment and trade promotion
• SME development
• Domestic and export market access and development
• Competitiveness strategies
• Supply chain development
• Public-private partnerships
• Institutional capacity building
• Matching grants facilities
• Sector specific policy development including tourism.
Topping the list is the company’s proprietary Integrated Value Chain Analysis (IVCA). The IVCA is a foremost competitiveness diagnostic tool that captures input, production, administration, distribution, and marketing costs in a multi-part, data-intensive, dynamic software model. Within this flexible framework, GDS helps clients identify time and cost reductions as well as policy interventions that will enable the private sector to bring products to market on schedule and at optimal price points. The IVCA:
• Pinpoints, qualifies, and quantifies barriers to competitiveness thus allowing clients to focus on specific actions to improve competitiveness
• Reveals detailed information on multiple levels of value addition leading to targeted areas of improvement to productivity and to identify both institutional and legal barriers to competitiveness
• Benchmarks against global and regional competitors
Development organizations and governments often call GDS at the project design stage in order to benefit from identification of prioritized issues that GDS provides; critical information in formulating strategies and designing interventions for large scale development programs. GDS then plays a key role in monitoring and evaluation when called in again to oversee implementation and reevaluate the value chain to determine program impact over time. The IVCA is implemented once again at the end of a development program to determine the program’s effectiveness over the life of the project.
Clients use the IVCA to assess competitiveness and formulate market and product strategies in a range of sectors including agriculture, food processing, light and heavy manufacturing and even tourism. In the decade since GDS developed its IVCA, the company has implemented the methodology more than 180 times covering 77 specific product groups performed in more than 25 countries thus amassing a robust database against which critical factors affecting competitiveness can be benchmarked.
Keywords: competitiveness, value chain, analysis, development, developing, Africa, Asia, Central Asia, supply chain, agriculture, agribusiness, diagnostic, SME, MSME, benchmark, technical assistance, strategy, strategic, market development
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