Doing things differently: creating lasting changes in how agribusiness is done in Mozambique

Final report for the Feed the Future Mozambique Agricultural Innovations Activity (FTF Inova) - a five-year MSD programme running from 2017-2022 in Mozambique.

FTF Inova worked with market actors, such as businesses and government entities, to adopt new ways of doing business and delivering services to help Mozambican agriculture become more competitive and inclusive. 

To address the systemic weaknesses holding back sustainable growth and competitiveness across commodity-specific value chains, FTF Inova took an agile Market Systems Development (MSD) approach that focused on:

• Cultivating trust among market actors
• Illuminating mutual incentives
• Co-creating with the full range of market players
• Supporting ‘early movers’ via structured partnerships that started small, evolved, and deepened in step with their successes
• Facilitating new ways of working in the core functions of supply and demand, supporting services, and rulemaking
• “Nudging” market players toward an inclusive equilibrium that would last.

This report details how this was done. It concludes with the six key lessons learned from experience partnering with the private sector:

1. Lay the groundwork upfront
2. Promising partners can be hard to find in thin markets
3. Facilitative MSD partnerships rely on ideas first, then trust and credibility. It takes time to earn them, and focused effort to keep them
4. Not everything gets traction or scale
5. Include government players