AVC Resources

The following are resources and tools that have been developed by EWB’s Agriculture Value Chains team over the past 5 years.

These resources target the organizational capacity to apply a systems approach (like Value Chains or M4P) through market facilitation.  They capture our observations and experiences of working with multiple organizations in West- and Southern-Africa.  Other valuable resources have been developed by other organizations focused on the details of a systems approach which we highly recommend reading if you are unfamiliar with the approach.

In a very simplified formula, we have observed that sustainable development interventions in markets require a systems approach to the problems being addressed and in the project design, effective market facilitation from field staff and the organizational capacity to do both.

Our resources address these three elements, but focus predominantly on the organizational capacity and staff capacity to do market facilitation effectively in practice.

We believe in open access to information to improve interventions and promote discussion in development.  We also believe in learning and are continually reviewing and revising our resources based on feedback from our peers, partners and our own experiences working with them.  If you are running a project adopting a market facilitation approach (or want to be), please download and test these tools with your organization and project and provide us with feedback by contacting us.

These resources can also be found on USAID’s microlinks site.

Benchmarking Market Facilitation Organizations

• Organizational Diagnostic for Market Facilitation (Organisational Diagnostic) + sample of the adjoining interactive tool

Market Facilitator Skills Development

• Being a Market Facilitator – A Market Facilitation Roles and Capacities Guide
• Market Facilitation Case Studies
  • Case studies of good and bad market facilitation, as observed in practice
• Market Facilitation Roles and Capacities Quick Reference Guide
  • A helpful quick reference tool for field staff

For the saame resources in USAID formatting:

• A Market Facilitation Roles and Capacities Guide
• Market Facilitation Case Studies
• Quick Guidelines for Market Facilitators

Knowledge Management and M&E Systems

• Understanding and Improving Knowledge Management Systems in Development
  • A  framework and comparison of traditional and innovative M&E/KM systems coupled with some practical dos and donts.

• Assessing Knowledge Management and M&E Systems
  • A quick quiz to refresh and test your ideas on management and communication systems.
• Network Mapping in Market Systems
  • Guidelines for network mapping in complex systems