Scaling Impact: Cambodia Ex-Post Assessment

LEO is researching a diversity of models that implementing agencies are using to solve the issue of linking smallholders, including the very poor, to input and output markets. The research focuses on the principles and conditions that made these models effective.

Since 2013, LEO has conducted research into projects that have addressed these issues through a market systems facilitation approach (see textbox 1). In Phase 1 of this research, LEO conducted two desk-based reviews of 50 projects, with a more detailed study of 16 projects. The results were summarized in two papers (Fowler & White, 2015a and b). Phase 2 of this research includes two field-based case studies focused on expanding the learning of priority cases from Phase 1. This is the final report from the second of those research projects, assessing the legacy of the input supply sector development activities of the USAID/Cambodia Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) project’s Phases 1 and 2.

MSME promoted the use by the private sector of an embedded training model, in which companies would provide technical information on input selection and application at no direct charge to swine farmers in order to increase input sales. This study finds that the em-bedded training model has endured and even expanded since the end of the project, being used to varying extents by the majority of the firms in the sector. Only one of the 11 surveyed wholesalers that MSME worked with had discontinued its use of the model. Firms have adapted their training offering vis-à-vis the model originally promoted by MSME, and are also using other methods (e.g., direct farm visits) to provide technical information. New input wholesalers who launched following the end of the MSME project are also applying an embedded training model, indicating that it has become an industry norm.

Section two of this document summarizes the MSME project’s objectives and theory of change for the growth of embedded training models in the swine input supply sector. Section three presents the field research methodology, including limitations. Section four outlines the broader economic and social context in which the project operated, including drivers of change to which the project was responding and/or shaping. Section five presents the findings of the field research. Finally, section six presents overarching conclusions.