Jumpstarting Agribusiness Markets: Leveraging Economic Opportunities (LEO) Report 21

Many donors and implementers have adopted a facilitation approach that catalyzes changes in both the structure and dynamics of market systems. Feed the Future, the US Government's global hunger and food security initiative, has adopted a value chain approach based on facilitation to improve agricultural productivity and nutrition, and to increase incomes at the household, community, and market levels. A common element across these programs is that implementers do not have primary contact with target beneficiaries. Instead, they focus their interventions on firms and groups at other levels of the value chain, especially firms that are linked to smallholders through value chain relationships. Within the context of agricultural market systems, project implementers might work primarily with vertically linked firms, such as input suppliers, traders, processors, wholesalers, and exporters; horizontally linked producer associations, through cooperative and association leaders; or firms in supporting markets, such as those providing financial, veterinary, or transportation services. Smallholders are reached as secondary contacts when they are targeted through these value chain relationships. The process of targeting farmers as secondary contacts is described in a report from the Samarth project in Nepal, which emphasizes that facilitation may be slower to reach target beneficiaries than approaches that interact more directly with target beneficiaries. The demonstration effects are intended to draw attention to, at the smallholder level, the benefits of project-promoted agricultural production and marketing technologies and, for firms at other levels of the value chain, to demonstrate the benefits of new, more inclusive business practices. Firms imitate the projects' private-sector partners by "crowding in" to form commercial relationships with smallholders, based on new, more inclusive business practices. Smallholders, for their part, imitate the new agricultural and business practices they observe among their neighbors, friends, and family. The same outreach strategies that contribute to scale and sustainability—namely, reaching target beneficiaries as secondary contacts and reaching them indirectly through imitation—also generate monitoring and evaluation challenges that can lead to undercounting the full outreach of these programs. A conceptual framework for understanding different categories of outreach under facilitation has been developed, defining primary and secondary contacts, direct and indirect beneficiaries, and more. This framework is based on the LEO taxonomy of facilitation contact groups, which differentiates between direct and indirect beneficiaries of a facilitation activity. The framework maps these outreach categories to the stages described in the Adopt-Adapt-Expand-Respond framework for measuring systemic change. The study examines the recent evidence on outreach and inventorying the methods used to measure outreach to target beneficiaries. Eleven cases of facilitation activities in agricultural market systems are presented, along with the outreach-related indicators that they report in their project documents. The reported results for these indicators are summarized, and the variety of methods that were used to measure outreach to smallholders is detailed. The findings have implications for improving the way that outreach and scale are measured and expanding the capacity to measure the full scale of outreach under facilitation.