While the role of markets in delivering humanitarian assistance is now widely acknowledged, the opportunity of supporting markets to reinforce their capacities and resilience, and as a critical component of food security and livelihood security, remains largely the domain of developmental strategies and interventions. Additionally the design of humanitarian responses is still done in a number of cases with insufficient understanding of market systems, preventing an informed choice between response modalities and reducing the range of response options available. The almost general absence of market systems baselines imposes stress on stretched teams while designing and starting an emergency response. Yet, the problem is not necessarily the lack of market information but the lack of processes and institutional capacity in place to compile and analyse that information in order to understand market capacity and expandability, and therefore inform emergency preparedness and response design.
