Market and Employment for Peace and Stability

The project mainly builds on free participation of people, women and men, in economic activities. The project aims at addressing obstacles for changing specific functions, services, rules of various actors in the environment. Successful engagement in employment or self-employment will help preventing youth to have a choice for employment and to keep them away from coping strategies which create further vulnerabilities. We will discover sustainable employment opportunities for women and men including youth and assist them in making use of their potential. The following model will be applied to achieve the aforementioned objectives of the project. Inclusive Market System Development approach (IMSD) The Project’s approach is that of a systemic market system development approach. This implies systemic thinking to improve access to employment and businesses. MSD focuses on changes or improvements in the market system to enable larger numbers of poor people to benefit. The main features of Inclusive market systems approach include:  Understanding the Context: Where do systems fail to support the needs of the poor? It’s important to understand causes of these failures rather than just the symptoms.  Facilitation role of development projects: Facilitate systemic changes. This should be done, not by taking up market functions (e.g. training, financial services, etc.) but rather by encouraging market actors to perform better. A project needs to create and/or emphasize potential incentives and win-win situations for market actors when they assume roles which will benefit poor and disadvantaged market actors.  Large scale impact: A market systems development approach explicitly aims to reach large numbers of poor people by harnessing the dynamics of the market system and addressing impediments. It seeks leverage points, such as co-investment and ‘crowding’ in of market players.  Learning & adaptability: The approach assumes an interactive process of change which requires built-in learning to support flexible decision-making and seize windows of opportunity, even in difficult contexts.  Sustainability is a prime concern of IMSD. This means considering not just the existing alignment of key market functions and players but to know how they can work more effectively in the future, based on the incentives and capacities of players (government, private sector, associations etc.) to play different roles.  IMSD requires that governments and other support actors play a facilitating role. As external players they seek to catalyse others in the market system while not becoming part of it themselves.