Most changes to a sustainable livelihoods program happen gradually, through data review, monitoring visits, and quarterly check-ins. But every so often, a single conversation does more to reshape an approach than months of planning. This is one of those conversations, and it is worth documenting because it reflects something B2V tries to build into every program: the willingness to be wrong about an assumption and change course. 

What the program assumed going in 

Like many sustainable livelihoods programs, this one started with a reasonable but incomplete assumption: that the biggest barrier for households was access to training and market linkage. The design focused heavily on skill-building sessions and connecting farmers to buyers, on the logic that better skills and better market access would translate directly into better income. 

The conversation 

During a routine field visit, a farmer who had attended every training session so far was asked, plainly, what was actually stopping her from using what she had learned. Her answer was not about skills or market access at all. It was about time. Between farm work, household responsibilities, and caring for children, she simply did not have the hours in a day to take on a new income activity, no matter how well she understood it. It was a simple, obvious point in hindsight, and one the program's design had not accounted for. 

What changed 

That conversation led to a direct shift in how the sustainable livelihoods program approached scheduling and workload. Sessions were restructured to fit around existing routines rather than asking households to carve out new blocks of time. Where possible, new income activities were designed to layer onto tasks people were already doing, rather than sitting alongside them as an entirely separate demand. It was not a dramatic redesign, but it addressed the actual constraint rather than the assumed one. 

Why this matters for how B2V builds programs 

This is a useful reminder for anyone designing sustainable livelihoods work: the barrier a program assumes is rarely the barrier a household actually experiences. Skills and market access matter, but time, labor burden, and competing responsibilities often matter more, especially for women managing both farm and household work. A program built entirely around the first assumption, without checking it against lived reality, risks investing heavily in the wrong lever. 

The broader takeaway 

Field conversations like this one do not always make it into formal reporting, but they shape decisions in ways that data alone sometimes cannot. B2V treats these moments as a core part of how sustainable livelihoods programs get built and adjusted, not as anecdotes on the side of the real work, but as some of the most useful information available. The next time a program assumption looks obvious on paper, it is worth asking the people it is meant to serve whether it holds up in practice.