ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the three important elements— financial resources, access to markets, and presents marketplace literacy— that is, skills and knowledge, self-confidence, and awareness of rights as customers and as entrepreneurs. It provides a unique marketplace literacy program now offered in some continents that addresses the difficulties low-literate, low-income individuals have. The chapter aims to understand consumers, entrepreneurs, and marketplaces across the world at the micro level of how people think, feel, and act in their life circumstances. It seeks to be bottom-up in using the insights for designing and implementing solutions. Subsistence means barely making ends meet at the bottom range of low income. The chapter includes a range of learning experiences and educational material to understand the bottom-up approach and about subsistence marketplaces. Understanding and designing solutions for subsistence marketplaces, can, in turn, provide the foundation for solutions for all contexts.
