Oxfam Humanitarian Markets Learning Event
On March 5-7, 2013, Oxfam hosted the 1st Global Markets Learning Event. This event looked at how the humanitarian community is engaging with markets and the private sector and brought together over 70 participants from a range of humanitarian agencies, together with development colleagues, academics, UN agencies, donors and the private sector.
A key discussion at the event was that market interventions could be understood to be on a spectrum, from ‘market awareness’ to full market development approaches. Within this spectrum, comes ‘market support’, where humanitarians are beginning to design programmes that strengthen the market systems through the delivery of humanitarian aid and can help to build resilience.
Much investment is still needed, from securing and developing the resources needed to carry out market assessments and using the results of these assessments effectively, through to developing standards in terms of how humanitarian should engage with markets in different responses and to aligning organisational policies and procedures to reflect the scope, ambition and evolution of this work.
Work has already begun in response to the learning event outcomes. A working group is currently scoping existing platforms and beginning to think about the development of terms of reference and a potential model for a Markets Community of Practice, looking at effective ways of establishing it within and/or connecting it with relevant existing platforms.
For more information, please contact Emily Henderson at ehenderson@oxfam.org.uk