Organizing smallholder farmers in clusters has been widely promoted as a way to boost agricultural productivity, streamline delivery of extension services, and improve access to markets. In Bangladesh, where shrimp is an important export crop produced largely by smallholders, government and industry view clustering as key to preventing Bangladesh being left behind in an increasingly competitive global market. Bangladesh’s shrimp exports are highly dependent on the hotel, restaurant, and catering (HoReCa) sector in Europe—a small and relatively low value market segment. Gaining access to the much larger and potentially more lucrative retail market segment in Europe and North America requires high quality, traceable, and - increasingly - certified, shrimp, posing a challenging for Bangladesh. To this end, several recent initiatives in Bangladesh have attempted to organize shrimp farmers into clusters with a view to addressing a suite of issues around productivity, product aggregation and quality control. These parallel efforts - led by the Department of Fisheries (DoF), a shrimp processing company, and an industry body, the Bangladesh Shrimp and Fish Foundation (BSFF) - have focused on forming groups of 20-25 farmers to deliver training on best management practices, supply inputs, and encourage coordination. Group members were encouraged to follow a suite of farm management prescriptions aimed at reducing raising farm productivity, reducing the incidence of shrimp disease, and increasing the supply of raw material for processors. These measures included farming bagda shrimp (P. monodon)—Bangladesh’s main export species—in monoculture, raising shrimp stocking densities, stocking disease-free shrimp larvae and factory-made feeds, deepening ponds and erect biosecurity fencing, and coordinating stocking and harvesting activities with other group members. An IFPRI-led evaluation of 1,222 farmers and 68 shrimp clusters in southern Bangladesh provides insights on the effectiveness of these initiatives identifying a number of important benefits as well as significant challenges and limitations.