What is LED
LED, or Local Economic Development, is the practical application of the study of Development Economics.
The study of economics is the study of scarce resources and the most optimum use of those resources. Development economics investigates the various ways that an economy can be strengthened or weakened through intervention strategies employed by a professional LED Officer.
There are a wide range of frameworks and methodologies used in the arsenal of the LED officer, who is often trained to use the tools in a given toolkit.
Who is the LED Professional at Plein Chamber?
Our Founder and current Executive Chairman, Mr Sean Achim, has been trained in Scotland at Strathclyde University in the Market Development Approach to LED as well as in the Logical Framework Approach to program development. He majored in Development Economics as part of his B.Com in 1987 at the University of the Western Cape and has been actively involved in the Business Incubation discipline since 2000, having the written the training material for the establishment of a business incubator as part of a World Bank funded initiative for what is today SEDA Technologies.
Mr Achim's research has stretched across business incubators and LED Officers across the whole of the United States, the UK, India and Tanzania. His Commercialisation models and work has borne fruit for decades to the benefit of many inventors and local businesses.
What is a market development approach to led?
Simply put, this approach studies all of the contributory sectors within the value chain of a targetted sector and works to create a market that can optimise the full value chain in order to reposition the targetted sector as a strong contender in the marketplace. This approach leads to more sustainable growth of all of the participants assembled into a targetted sector and also creates more spin-off opportunities for everyone within the geographic region targetted.
The best account of a single entrepreneur applying the methods of the Market Development approach is the story of John Thompson and how he single handedly saved the Thai Silk Sector.
This approach, along with the USAID's Logical Framework Approach (developed in 1969 and has been the primary Monitoring & Evaluation and Program Development tool used by donor recipients when funded by Donors such as USAID and others for decades) has proven consistently successful at rebuilding local municipalities and local economies from Bangladesh to Brazil, from Tanzania to South Africa for decades.
