Pre-intervention investment toolkit

MSD programmes often select and design interventions to facilitate business innovation – new supplies, new demand or new business models (new ways of producing and distributing supply, or new ways of producing and aggregating to meet demand) designed to allow poor people to participate more advantageously in markets.

 

However, the challenge facing MSD programme managers is to identify business innovations that really can change the way that markets work.

 

This toolkit emerges from previous research on achieving impact at scale through MSD interventions, which shows that many MSD projects base their investment decisions on some form of pre-intervention due diligence, but the focus tends to be more on the developmental impact of interventions than on the likelihood for long-term commercial success. As a result, there is considerable variation in the quality of such analysis, and much can be left to chance or wishful thinking.

 

This toolkit is designed to provide a framework for MSD programmes to analyse and assess potential private sector partnership interventions. Using the toolkit will help MSD programmes working with, and through, the private sector, by bringing structure and rigour to intervention investment decisions – focused on the intervention’s potential to achieve impact at scale.