The MEVM is an intuitive, user friendly approach to creatively documenting, organizing, understanding, and explaining Value Chain networks for a product or service that generates critical income to an economically insecure population.

 

Because the resulting map is built of highly graphic icons that illustrate intuitively pan-human symbols for action, emotion, threats and rewards, they can be used as mediums for quickly sharing massive amounts of information with other aid practitioners as well as catalysts for engaging beneficiary populations. The data can be gathered relatively quickly, as the strategy pulls together existing information from traditional focus groups, key informant interviews, surveys, and Cultural Consensus Analytics.

 

Once mapped, the value-chain is framed in the most powerful understanding of society that social sciences has to offer: the formulation of the infrastructure (environmental, demographic, technological & economic resources and constraints), structure (social and institutional resources and constraints) and superstructure (ideological resources and constraints). The material-institutional-ideological model is then used as a framework for identifying the resources and constraints that bear on the value-chain. Identifying these resources and constraints leads to an understanding of the practical possibilities and limitations for humanitarian intervention.

 

The ultimate objective is to identify opportunities to repair broken production and market chains or to improve the chain and thereby improve the economic well-being and resiliency of vulnerable populations.