How to! Stimulate last mile delivery of vital goods and services

Balancing development practice and business dealings - using community-based delivery agents as last mile agents.

In traditional M4P projects, making markets work for the poor can be tricky. Thriving market systems in developing countries are typically clustered in and around urban and peri-urban centres. This is mainly because of the absence of evolved infrastructure and organised market structures for efficient rural distribution in hard-to-reach places. 

There is also a general underestimation, unawareness and/or misunderstanding of market opportunities and the consumer base present in remote areas. The bottom line for private sector companies is turnover and profit. They are not particularly willing to invest money into testing unproven business models or in trying to break into new territories.

This is chiefly the case in a developing country such as Nigeria. There is not enough competition for the provision of certain goods and services which are important to poor people. Meanwhile the profits from the consumer base present in more urban areas are sometimes enough to keep companies in business.

At PrOpCom Mai-karfi (PM), we learnt early on to wear different hats in our work. Being able to stimulate beneficial changes in market systems means that these hats are both a business hat and the development practitioner’s hat. 

Getting businesses to think ‘rural’ and to see the potential therein can be daunting given the obvious bottlenecks which impede business channels to more rural centres. There is also preconceived biases on the small purchasing powers of the poor versus the cost of reaching them. Thus, as with other market development programmes, we have sought to additionally seek out the value for businesses in reaching poor people. 

This ‘How to!’ note, is one of a series in which practitioners share technical information about how to tackle a commonly met challenge in market systems development. If you would like to share your own ‘How to!’ note, please contact editor@beamexchange.org