It raises awareness on gender inequalities and discusses the importance of addressing these dimensions in value chain development, while also building a common approach for work on gender-sensitive value chain development. It achieves this by bringing together key concep ts from value chain development and gender and by providing concrete guiding principles for the integration of gender concerns into value chain development projects and programmes. This conceptual framework has a companion publication, Developing gender-sensitive value chains: Guidelines for practitioners, which provides specific tools to support practitioners in designing, implementing and monitoring gender-sensitive value chain programmes.