Who Captures Value? Lessons from East Africa on Fixing Extractive Supply Chains

In emerging markets, global supply chains share a common architecture: outbound demand flows from wealthy markets into lower-income ones, strong currencies into weaker ones. That asymmetry creates margin – and where there’s margin and opacity, extraction follows. Communities in travel, food, and handicrafts produce the value; intermediaries capture it.

In East Africa’s community-based tourism sector, we’re running a live pilot of a different model – one that gives producers structured market access, digital tools, and direct distribution, replacing broker dependency with infrastructure. This session uses that pilot to ask: what does anti-extractive supply chain design look like, and what would it take to replicate it across sectors?