Market mapping
A “market map” describes how a market system works – the farmers, producers, traders, wholesalers, retailers and consumers.
The Market Map is at the core of Practical Action’s work in making markets work for poor people. It can be used as a framework for analysing the entire commercial and institutional environment in which producers operate, and when used in a participatory way, it is a powerful tool to encourage people within the “market chain” to work together.
Our Participatory Market Mapping Workshops bring together a wide variety of market actors to contribute their unique perspectives about the system in which they all operate. Drawing on these different views and knowledge, the Market Map becomes a platform for common and shared understanding amongst the market actors, paving the way for further interaction. As trust builds between them, market actors begin to work together to solve shared problems.
The Market Map has evolved into useful framework for analysis of market systems that involve the poor and a tool for guiding interventions.
Initial mapping by a project team helps them to make sense of the complexity of market systems and understand critical structures, actors, relationships forces and drivers of change. This knowledge is used to bring together key market actors and stakeholders to develop a vision of market growth and sustainability.
Participatory market mapping workshops facilitate dialogue, trust-building, collaboration and joint action amongst a wide variety of market actors and policy-makers. They assess the opportunities and blockages in the system and develop joint action plans. This process forms the basis of the strategic interventions.
Elements of the Market Map
Practical Action’s experience of working with rural producers has led us to integrating three key dimensions into a single framework – known as the ‘Market Map’ – which describes an overall market system.
In the middle we analyse the ‘market chain’. That’s the core of the market system, and describes the economic actors who producer, sell and buy a particular product as it moves from primary producer to final consumer. The market chain therefore includes farmers, producers, processors, traders, wholesalers and retailers.
Underneath the market chain, the framework invites an analysis of the inputs and services that are essential for the market chain to operate. Although input and service providers never own the product itself, because they deliver essential business inputs and services into the chain, they are just as an essential part of the system. Input and service providers may include seed and fertiliser suppliers, veterinarian services, financial services, harvest coordinators, fuel stations, market information providers, road transport, packaging agents and so on.
Finally it is important to analyse the environment in which the market system operates. This means looking at economic policies and laws, trading and quality standards, natural resource (including land) management arrangements, social and cultural norms, the environmental context, consumer trends, political pressures and governance to name some important areas.
The market map serves two purposes: it is a framework for conceptualizing the entire commercial and institutional environment in which rural producers operate; and it is a practical tool for market facilitators to develop, visually represent and succinctly communicate this knowledge among different stakeholders. It plays an important role therefore in encouraging market literacy: that is, a better understanding of the institutions, competencies and relationships necessary for specific market systems to work for poor producers.
Participatory Market Mapping Workshops
In Practical Action’s early experience as a market facilitator, the process of constructing and elaborating the market map with producers and other market-chain participants, proved to be an important intervention in its own right: leading to improved linkages and relationships between market-chain actors, and preparing the ground for introducing or generating innovation in products, processes and market access. Over the past seven years this has led to the emergence of a participatory approach to market system development which has mapping the market at its heart.
Mapping the market: a framework for rural enterprise development policy and practice
Learning from practice: lessons on facilitating Participatory Market Mapping Workshops
Podcast: Participatory Market Mapping in the Pisces project in Kenya
