Market facilitation in aid-intensive contexts
BEAM webinar: Market facilitation in aid-intensive contexts: tactics for coping with aid-induced market behaviour
28 January 2016
Speakers: Shahnila Azher, Nathalie Gunasekera and Md. Rubaiyath Sarwar.
When donors become market players and potentially distort attempts to achieve long term and large-scale change, how should market systems programmes respond? This webinar focused on strategies and tactics to deal with distortion such as:
- the competition between market systems and direct service delivery projects, where projects trying to facilitate systemic changes using a market systems approach face competition from others that are readily handing out money and giving away services for free
- the 'market systems partnership competition' where too many market system projects compete with each other for the same, limited, pool of partners and the private sector has realised that partnering with market systems projects can be very profitable.
Shahnila Azher, DFID Bangladesh, reflected on the tension between market-based programmes and more traditional approaches within donor organisations and how thinking has evolved in DFID. Nathalie Gunasekera, HELVETAS, spoke on her experience from the Western Balkans, while Rubaiyath Sarwar looked at how programmes and businesses are responding and what such distortion looks like on the ground.