USAID's Feed the Future (FTF) Bangladesh Rice and Diversified Crops Activity worked to increase incomes and improve food security and nutrition in the 22 southern Bangladeshi districts from 2016-2021.
This outcome harvest focuses on:
- Which business models promoted by the Activity resulted in systemic changes
- The scope and characteristics of these systemic changes
- Which influences contributed to these systemic changes
Despite two negative consequences of work - supply constraints hampering the marketing of new products and digital illiteracy threatening to exclude some marginalised groups - the report documents some consequential changes in the performance of agricultural market systems in the region.
Four themes emerged from the analysis of the Activity's work:
- it extended and deepened market actor engagement in the FTF zone
- it helped market actors experiment with innovations and operational improvements
- with the Activity’s support, several actors developed new, specialised services or discovered markets for relatively niche products
- it facilitated a massive increase in the flow of useful information moving between all types of market actors in the FTF zone
Read the blog: Using market-based approaches to respond to shocks: insights from Bangladesh
View also the May 2022 BEAM webinar Responding to shocks using market-based approaches: insights from RDC Bangladesh