Microlinks Breakfast: the Market Facilitation Approach

By Prince White

This morning, June 25, 2009, USAID’s Microenterprise Development office hosted a breakfast seminar, which is part of a monthly series that focuses on enterprise development. This month’s seminar was entitled, “Organizational Capacity: Why the Value Chain Approach May Fail,” and the presenter was Ka-Hay Law from Engineers Without Borders Canada. Law’s main argument was that organizations take a failing approach to market intervention.

Law’s experiences from Zambia exposed her to the reality that the standard and most common approaches to market intervention may not and usually do not produce long term systemic change. Moreover, she has observed markets returning to their basic failing conditions soon after organizations complete their projects and leave. Law argues that the value chain approach may assist some individuals in the short term; however, for long term gains the nature of the relationship between actors in the market must change. Law and Engineers Without Borders Canada’s solution to the problem is the adoption of a market facilitation approach.

The market facilitation approach evolves increasing the relationships and the networks in a market and taking a less direct role in business success. Furthermore, Law’s approach is to increase local organizations’ capacity to encourage and develop effective, working relationships in the market place. She expressed five roles that facilitators may find themselves in are a coach, relationship builder, business person, innovator and communicator. An interesting point which came from an audience member during the question and answer session dealt with the evaluation of the effectiveness of market facilitation. His point was that, from the work that he was involved with at the OTF Group, he had observed trust to be an important measurement of success. He described encountering individuals at the beginning of a market facilitation project that held so much distrust toward each they did not want to sit next to each other, or even be in the same room together. By the end of the project they were able to effectively work together to achieve their respective goals.

Law’s presentation was interesting and insightful. It dealt with issues germane to the development of African business and improving efficiency in non-government organizations. The presentation was recorded and it along with the PowerPoint and a paper will be available online later this month HERE. Next month’s seminar takes place July 23, 2009. The title is “Integrating Gender into Agricultural Value Chains: Experiences from Kenya and Tanzania,” with Cristina Manfre and Deborah Rubin.