NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

As the developing world bears the brunt of climate change, iDE has launched an index which measures the resilience of emerging markets to shocks and stressors, setting a new industry standard for development work.

Featured last month in a Journal of Sustainability article, the Market Systems Resilience Index (MSRI) tool enables development organisations to detect the strength of relationships among participants within a market system, helping to adapt programming and direct efforts to building relationships where necessary.

Lizz Ellis shared that the index was a powerful new benchmarking tool which enables users to hold themselves and their partners accountable to implementing best-practice adaptive development interventions.

“At iDE, we believe that strong, inclusive markets promote household resilience through income generation, improved food security, and increased employment opportunities,” said Ellis.

“However, for the benefits of an inclusive market system to be sustainable, we also need to assess the ability of the system itself to withstand, react, and transform in the face of climate change, conflict, and other shocks and stressors.”

She said the MSRI tool was developed to guide development organisations as they conducted resilience assessments and helped to promote the inclusion of all relevant actors, especially women and socially excluded groups, within a market system.

A market’s resilience is measured by examining 11 equally weighted determinants derived from academic literature. Enumerators conduct surveys with households and relevant market actors, asking a series of questions, which probe the strength of the determinants within a geographically defined market.

Answers are scored on a rubric, depending on a determinant’s detected strength. Several hundred respondents are asked about a range of topics including basic personal details, what crops and livestock they farm, their access to value chains and services, and what shocks and stressors they’ve experienced. Answers are recorded on smartphones and automatically tabulated. The sum of the answers provides a score for each determinant, as well as an averaged overall score.

The MSRI tool was recently applied in Mozambique’s Beira Corridor, which is recovering from a series of cyclones. iDE found that market actors showed more resilience than households to the cyclones, and that among market actors, input suppliers had higher resilience scores than retailers and output market actors.

In Nepal, the MSRI tool demonstrated farmers and households were well connected to market actors but showed low levels of preparedness, which was worrying given their high levels of vulnerability.

In Bangladesh, the MSRI was applied to participants in a nutrition-enhancement programme, who showed low levels of resilience when it came to integration, diversity, and collaboration. As a result, programme staff are now focusing interventions to address these poorly scoring determinants.

Photo courtesy of iDE.