Abstract:
After the local war, micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) have been facing huge
problems in Jaffna District and they have poor quality of product and services. The purpose
of this paper is to explore the meaningful value addition strategies to access standards for
products of micro, small and medium entrepreneurs (MSMEs) for establishing a competitive
advantage. Coconut is vital sector of SMEs and also one of the major resources in Jaffna
district. This sector has the greatest prospects for growth and development. Value addition for
coconut based productions leads to more quality and creates adequate demand for the
products. Thus researcher scoped coconut sector among the MSMEs. The research is
qualitative in nature with exploratory narrative research. Under purposive sampling technique,
the owners or managers of enterprises and stake holders of MSMEs were interviewed by
using unstructured questions to explore the value addition. The author proposed two
momentous models; they are model of values addition strategies to access standards as a tool
for competitive advantage and collaborative institutional model to access standards with the
participation of government and non-government organizations. The findings are; first model
induces MSMEs to access standards and second model explains the means to achieve the
standard. Especially this research expresses the essential of sincere collaborative work of
institutions towards the quality productions and development of MSMEs. Further this
research points out that the notion of value addition practices has been evolved and is
increasingly understood consideration for economic development of Sri Lanka.
