This is the sixth and final installment in the enabling environment analytical tools series. Read the earlier installments, the Enabling Environment Tools Kickoff Post, AgBEE, AgCLIR, VcCLIR and SeedCLIR tool profiles for more information.

As USAID programming orients to meet Global Food Security Strategy market access and inclusive agricultural market systems objectives, Missions and practitioners must be equipped with the right tools to identify underlying causes of agricultural market challenges. Improving the enabling environment —  both formal and informal rules (societal norms and traditions) that guide behavior — is key to strengthening markets and trade as well as building robust, inclusive agricultural systems. For a closer look at this key relationship, please see the Enabling Environment in Market Systems technical note.

USAID’s enabling environment analytical tools provide the methodological and analytical means by which to drive inclusive agricultural market systems policy reform. The tools’ benchmarking abilities capture and map agricultural sector performance, allowing practitioners to conduct comparative analyses over time. Generating this robust evidence base, these tools identify best practices to champion targeted policy reform to strengthen agriculture market systems. By tackling enabling environment reforms, such as reducing the uncertainty and risk of doing business, farmers and other stakeholders are incentivized by a more certain return on their investments — the bedrock of long-term, sustainable growth.

To centralize access to these resources, we have provided here a roundup of these valuable enabling environment analytical tools. In addition to the series kickoff post, these tools include:

The Agriculture Business Enabling Environment (AgBEE) Snapshot tool identifies critical gaps in existing research and focus deep-dive analysis, offering quick and low-cost data collection analysis at the country level.

The Agribusiness Commercial, Legal and Institutional Reform (AgCLIR) tool offers a systems-based approach to identify root causes for agricultural market systems failures, translating findings into action.

The Value Chain Commercial, Legal and Institutional Reform (VcCLIR) tool identifies the policy, legal and institutional constraints impacting a specific value chain to illuminate the challenges to firm and farm growth for a specific commodity.

The Seed Commercial, Legal and Institutional Reform (SeedCLIR) is a data-driven tool designed to enable countries to assess critical seed sector weaknesses, undertake targeted seed sector reforms and effectively gauge performance of reform activities over time.

Clicking on any of the above articles will provide you with an overview of each tool as well as practical case studies of their implementation. We invite you to bookmark this post for easy reference as well as to share with your networks. For more information on any of these tools, please contact the Feed the Future Enabling Environment for Food Security project.