Market Systems for Resilience

After years of humanitarian support in response to crises, it has become clear that assistance does not necessarily reduce vulnerability or leave households better prepared for the next shock. This insight, in conjunction with the recognition that interventions would benefit from increased integration, has led to the emergence of resilience as a key operational concept for development.

USAID’s resilience policy promotes a unifying model to integrate humanitarian and development assistance. It promotes layering, integrating, and sequencing humanitarian response to recurrent crises with longer-term development activities to empower households and communities to predict, prepare for, withstand, and recover from shocks.

While the resilience concept has become prevalent in development over the past few years, the role of market systems in resilience has received less attention. This paper aims to address this gap by focusing on the synergy and tensions between market systems development and resilience programming.