The CRS Approach to Market Systems Development

This report explains CRS’ tailored approach to market systems development (MSD) across the Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus  and how it can be an engine for CRS to achieve its goals.

Markets are essential to provide people with access to food, products and services to survive and thrive, as well as opportunities to achieve dignified and resilient livelihoods at scale. The people who CRS serves all perform roles within, and engage with, markets. They are entrepreneurs, producers, workers and consumers. It is within the markets that they find jobs to support their families, seeds to cultivate their land, building materials to upgrade their homes, sanitation services to improve their health, and more. A growing body of evidence from around the world, including from CRS programs, shows that leveraging private and public investment and innovation, and influencing markets to become more inclusive can enable millions of people to obtain essential goods and services, production inputs and access to markets and opportunities that they could not before.