Consideration of market forces is critical. FISP intended to help smallholders preserve historic sources of household income and promote income diversification through the sale of alternative crops. It did not, however, directly address the broader market forces that could support or detract from the program aims, which may have detracted from the program’s impact. For example, in the epidemic zone, a focus on keeping farmers in coconut production may have been a short-sighted goal given the wider trends in the Mozambican coconut industry, namely the shuttering of private plantations in response to disease and economic pressures, and a changing international coconut product market that favored produce from other countries. In the endemic zones, a lack of formal linkages to alternative crop markets may have contributed to the low-intensity in alternative crop-uptake among farmers. Today, economic constraints and root cause analyses, which are intended to identify and consider a broad set of economic factors impacting potential intervention areas, are a regular part of Compact Development at MCC and contribute to a more comprehensive understanding contextual factors which could impact a project’s logic model. Lessons from the FISP experience support the continued use of carefully and discretely applied analytical tools in future MCC compacts.
Lesson Learned