A quick guide to ComMark
What we do
Southern Africa is home to some of the world’s poorest households. Notwithstanding substantial natural resources, fertile soils and a rich entrepreneurial culture, many Southern African countries battle high poverty levels, increasing income inequality and often surprisingly low levels of economic activity.
There are many possible reasons for these disturbing outcomes, but two key explanations lie in the area of ‘market failure’ and government failure. Market failures refer to those situations where the ‘market’ or private sector fails to provide goods and services even where there is demand for them, provides insufficient quantity of goods and services or is unable to provide at an appropriate price. A lack of information often contributes to market failures for example if the private sector is unable to accurately quantify the demand for vegetable seed in deep rural areas.
Government failure refers to those instances where government – for a variety of reasons – is unable to provide a policy framework which facilitates growth and development. A good example of the latter is overly burdensome regulations which make it difficult for small enterprises to operate efficiently.
Market and government failures are a cornerstone of modern development economics and an appreciation of the significant impact that these can have on developing countries’ growth prospects led to DFID South Africa’s 2003 decision to fund the creation of a non-profit Trust – ComMark – which would pilot a development approach called ‘Making Markets Work for the Poor’.
ComMark, now in its fifth year, thus aims to catalyse commodity and service markets in Southern Africa to work more efficiently and effectively and to thereby impact on the lives of the poor in measurable and concrete ways.
ComMark has three broad areas of activity:
Strategy and policy
Here we attempt to influence government processes at the highest level in order to facilitate policy-making which is evidence-based and which takes account of the potential unintended consequences of government policy and legislation. Key projects in this area include assisting the government of Namibia to quantify the current and potential contribution of the tourism sector to economic development. In South Africa, we have assisted government to develop industrial strategies for key sectors of the economy such as autos, furniture and clothing & textiles.
Industry-wide restructuring and positioning for growth
Here ComMark focuses on developing action plans with an industry-wide mandate to facilitate productive developments in key sectors. In Lesotho, ComMark has played a significant role in co-ordinating the Government of Lesotho’s interaction with the US Congress to win further Africa Growth & Opportunity Act (AGOA) concessions for developing country clothing and textile industries. In addition, the Lesotho project has facilitated higher levels of training investment by firms and assisting in positioning the Lesotho industry as an ethical source of clothing where respect for human and labour rights is strong.
Enterprise-level interventions for demonstration purposes
Here ComMark works with a range of implementation partners responsible for managing direct project interventions at a local level. For example, the Eastern Cape Red Meat project is a ComMark flagship project where our intervention has led to a substantial increase in the returns on investment for impoverished cattle owners in three districts of South Africa’s poorest province, the Eastern Cape.
Through these three categories of intervention, ComMark has become an important partner of many governments in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Of the current 14 SADC member states, ComMark operates in all but four – the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, the Seychelles and Mauritius.
With a mandate to operate in 14 countries with a combined population of some 200 million people, ComMark has had to be highly strategic in choosing where to focus its limited resources. One way of stretching the budget has been to work closely with other donors and governments to leverage additional funding for worthy projects. Through this strategy over the last four-and-a-half years, ComMark has been able to leverage £1 for every £1 that we commit ourselves.
Moreover, ComMark’s mandate is to act as a catalyst and provide seed funding for innovative approaches to ‘development’. Our capacity to identify catalytic interventions and to communicate the benefits to other donors and government departments is a central theme of much of what we do. As a result, our indirect beneficiary tally now numbers some 300,000 people with approximately 80,000 people able to access ComMark services directly through our implementation partners. We expect this to increase significantly in the coming year as ComMark pilots four different models for subsistence farming – in the context of rising global food insecurity – with each approach expected to reach 10,000 direct beneficiaries per year.
Beneficiaries may be supported by ComMark in a variety of ways. For example, our Red Meat project has facilitated the creation of a ‘paravet’ business in the Eastern Cape with these previously un- or under-employed persons now operating their own enterprises supplying animal health services to cattle farmers. In Lesotho and South Africa, our wool programme has assisted sheep farmers to improve their lambing survival rates and their animals’ health, thereby directly improving the quantity and quality of wool sheared and thus the price they receive, and finally, through our wool shed programme we have improved the quality of shearing, leading to higher prices received by wool farmers and woolsheds.
Download our overarching logframe
Who do we fund?
We provide grants to implementation partners to carry out the development work of ComMark. We also fund policy-relevant research, such as value chain analysis, regulatory assessments and strategic assessments of bottlenecks to growth and development.
What do we achieve?
ComMark is active in commodity and service sectors that offer significant potential for pro-poor growth. We address the regulatory, policy, productivity, institutional and business service constraints in these sectors to make them work more inclusively and effectively for poor people – whether as workers, entrepreneurs or consumers.
Who do we work with?
Blurb on who we work with. View a map of all our implementer locations.
Where do we operate?
Need a blurb for this. View a map of all our project locations.