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International development initiatives increasingly focus on economic growth and poverty alleviation by improving access to existing markets for poor producers and consumers and make the benefits of well functioning markets more widely accessible to the poor. Value chain development is one of the major tools therein. This article introduces the changing agricultural context and factors influencing rural employment. It describes the increasing casualisation and feminisation of labour as well as increasing inequalities within chains. It concludes that value chain development does not automatically leads to employment creation, but that there are certainly opportunities for employment creation if this would be made explicit in the selection of sub sectors and value chain development interventions. A value chain can be described as the full range of activities necessary to bring a product from its conception to its end use including its disposal. A value chain is often defined by a combination of the raw material and the market, e.g. organic tomato juice for Italian food retailers. Value chain analysis allows understanding (international) competitive challenges, to identify relationships and vertical coordination mechanisms, to understand how chain actor