Realising the potential of pre-crisis market analysis

Humanitarians are increasingly looking at markets in an effort to respond to crises in a way that not only does no harm but also fosters long-term recovery. 

To help them do this, they have developed a slew of post-crisis rapid market assessment tools like EMMA, RAM, MAG, the 48-hour tool and the WFP Trader Survey, all designed to capture key information to help launch market-based responses. They have also spent a lot of time developing and compiling resources, training and guidance on markets in emergencies in places like the newly revamped EMMA website, CaLP’s markets pages and the Markets in Crises dgroup.

There’s only one problem – in practice, there often isn't enough time to use these tools and resources properly. We humanitarians intervene in emergencies, when needs are urgent, environments are chaotic and we’re often understaffed and under-resourced. Or, as sometimes happens, funding is abundant but the surge teams we deploy are unfamiliar with the local context. We’re under immense pressure to get emergency programmes up and running quickly. Very often we overlook market analysis altogether, but even when we do gather market-specific information, we have to do so quickly. Sometimes we make erroneous conclusions, or overlook entry points for market support that might have a lot more long-term and widespread benefit than our inevitably short-lived humanitarian assistance could ever have. Often, we focus only on whether the market can support cash or voucher delivery mechanisms.

It’s a paradox – as this research paper from HPG/ODI points out, good market analysis requires a comprehensive understanding of market systems, including power dynamics, political economy, the regulatory environment, and so forth, in addition to the more obvious issues of availability, access and quality of goods. All of this requires profound local knowledge, analysis and time. But the paper’s authors suggest that in practice, even the most robust of the humanitarian market assessment tools available often fail to capture crucial aspects of market system dynamics. At the same time, as commonly implemented these tools require substantial time, resources and expertise, which probably explains why they are not conducted on a regular basis.

So, what’s a market-minded humanitarian to do?

The Pre-Crisis Market Analysis (PCMA, formerly PCMMA) approach was developed in response to this dilemma. The rationale was simple: Since we don’t always have time to conduct proper market analyses after emergencies, why not carry them out beforehand, especially in contexts where crises are relatively predictable? Why not gather information now so that we are better prepared to respond quickly in the event of a future crisis? Taking it further, couldn't such assessments help tell us how we might take actions now that reduce the impacts of shocks when they do occur, potentially reducing the need for humanitarian assistance at all?

Such is the promise of PCMA, first published in 2014 and then in revised form early this year. PCMA describes an approach to adapting existing market assessment tools to the pre-crisis context, rather than purporting to be a standalone toolkit. The revised PCMA offers improved guidance on a number of topics, like selecting a crisis scenario, incorporating gender considerations into the assessment and setting up a plan for monitoring markets and updating the analysis after the official assessment ends. PCMA is catching on – at least nine PCMA reports from six countries have been produced since January 2015, compared to just three EMMA reports from two countries during the same period.

PCMA makes a lot of sense to me rationally. But as someone who has been involved with four PCMA assessments in the past year, and who has spent a fair bit of time trying to synthesize learning from other organisations involved in similar exercises, I think it has a way to go before it can live up to its full potential.

PCMA shares some of the drawbacks of the market assessment tools that it uses – it can be time intensive to implement, so much so that organisations often send only lower level staff to participate in the assessments, people who may not have the confidence, or the authority, to promote the resulting recommendations within their organisations or through coordination bodies. To date, it has also been conducted as a fairly resource intensive, standalone exercise that many organisations may find off-putting. During a pilot I helped to facilitate in Pakistan, our team found itself in the awkward position of diagnosing a number of issues with market systems that were well outside the humanitarian mandate to address. In addition, because we conducted the assessment during a non-crisis period, many organisations that participated in the exercise were about to terminate the contracts of the very staff who were conducting the research, raising questions about whether, and how, organisations would retain and apply what we had learned during the assessment.

It’s a bit too soon to make any big conclusions about the impact of the shift towards pre-crisis market assessments, though this definitely deserves more scrutiny, especially as predicted crises unfold and agencies have more opportunities to put PCMA recommendations to use. There are doubtless some small-scale victories to document – for example, in Somalia two agencies have decided to shift from in-kind to cash or voucher-based shelter and NFI responses in the event of another IDP influx following a PCMA conducted late last year. PCMA may not be the answer to ensuring consistent, well-informed market-based humanitarian responses, but it certainly seems to get us closer to that end.

But there is clearly space to broaden our thinking, and perhaps modify our approach to gathering market information in pre-crisis contexts, as well. PCMA sits at the intersection between the humanitarian and development worlds, and I won’t be the first to suggest that development and humanitarian practitioners should be able to work together to predict and plan for crises, and that doing so might address some of the persistent challenges that we’re facing. But what would this look like in practice? What would be the appropriate forum for this kind of collaboration? Do you have good examples to share? 

Emily is the Emergency Markets Officer at the International Rescue Committee.