Market facilitation in aid-intensive contexts

This webinar focused on strategies and tactics for market-based programmes to deal with donor distortion. Donor distortion could include:

• 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, brought insight and experience from the Western Balkans, and Rubaiyath Sarwar discussed how programmes and businesses are responding and what such distortion looks like on the ground.