An investigation of Market-Based Development through the DANIDA Market Development Partnerships Programme

Sammanfattning: This thesis investigates the concept of market-based development through the DANIDA Market Development Partnerships programme (DMDP), a challenge fund by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA). Market-based development is an emerging development approach that introduces the market in development work in order to achieve business goals and development objectives simultaneously, which has gained influence in the last decades. The investigation looks into this new development approach with the following research question: What challenges and advantages of market-based development can be identified through an investigation of the DMDP portfolio of market-based development projects? By applying a qualitative coding method on data from 18 active DMDP partnerships, several patterns and findings are identified, which are synthesized into 12 main results. These results are categorized into the following five main topics: 1) connection to the local context; 2) local capacity; 3) partnership building; 4) misalignment of interests; 5) market-based development approaches in practice. The results show that 1) being firmly connected to the local context is crucial for project success; 2) lack of local capacity is a challenge and it is important to recognize the issue of capacity asymmetry between partners; 3) partnership building is difficult and tends to be underestimated in the planning phase; 4) alignment of objectives and goals, the premise for market-based development, is difficult to obtain and can cause conflicts if not achieved; 5) some practical methods are more successful than others when carrying out a market-based development project in practice.