Milestone 8: Bridging Firms to Farms Market System Resilience Index Beira Corridor last-mile farmer and market data report

The country's remote villages and limited road network hinder small- and medium-scale farmers' access to buyers and sellers. As a result, farming families in Mozambique face numerous challenges, including a lack of input retailers and extension agents, limited access to credit, insecure markets, and few trustworthy buyers. The situation was exacerbated by Cyclone Idai, which destroyed 90% of the second-most populous city, Beira, and surrounding rural areas, including vital roads, dams, bridges, airports, homes, businesses, and farms. Exactly one year later, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, further challenging resilience and increasing the risk of sliding back into poverty. The Mozambican economy continues to be in flux due to uncertainty around case spikes and lockdowns. In response to these challenges, International Development Enterprises (iDE) and Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation began collaboration to strengthen market systems and resilience in Mozambique. The Farmer Resilience and Rebuilding Initiative (FRRI) aimed to facilitate access to inputs for farmers affected by cyclones through voucher-based agricultural Input Trade and Technology Fairs (ITTFs). However, iDE recognized the need to provide further support to ensure that ITTFs provide participating farmers with the right inputs, that farmers are able to use inputs appropriately, and that relationships formed at these fairs between commercial input suppliers, agrodealers, and farmers are long-lasting and continue in a post-recovery environment. To measure the strength of existing market relationships between commercial input suppliers, rural agrodealers, and farmers using the ITTFs as a point of transaction, iDE used the Market Systems Resilience Index (MSRI). The MSRI was used for the first time in a disaster recovery environment in Mozambique to provide insights for various stakeholders on the resilience level of the Beira Corridor. The MSRI results in Mozambique showed that market actors are more resilient than households, with all actors in Manica province having higher resilience levels than those in Sofala. Among market actors, input suppliers are more resilient than retailers and output market actors. The low resilience levels in households originate from poor market system connectivity, translating into weak market inclusion, integration, and collaboration. This suggests low participation of women and vulnerable groups in the market system, centralized household decision making, little involvement from different groups in relevant market processes, and weak evidence of collaboration among actors across value chains. On the other hand, households scored relatively high in market redundancy and diversity, indicating households have multiple options/places to buy or sell products and that income activities, crops, and livestock are somehow diversified. Future intervention areas should aim to improve women and vulnerable groups' participation as relevant market actors and decision makers, foster producer groups, and ensure farmers participate in other steps along the value chain. Understanding if a greater availability of input/output sources for households is related to iDE's FBAs model can be understood more deeply. Higher levels of resilience in market actors are driven by effective market feedback loops and market diversity, indicating that market actors in the Beira Corridor have the ability to learn from experiences through control mechanisms, that there are feedback systems in place between buyers and sellers, and that there are multiple market channels for sale of inputs and production.