Description

Background: BASIS CRSP (Broadening Access and Strengthening Input Market Systems Collaborative Research Support Program) promotes economic growth and agricultural development through collaborative research and training on ways to improve access to and efficiency of land, water, labor, and financial markets. Strategies proposed in Africa, Russia and the Newly Independent States, and Latin America help increase income, purchasing power, and food availability while promoting sustainable resource management. Through jointly developed and collaborative programs of research and training on land, water, labor, and financial markets and their interactions, BASIS CRSP helps strengthen both US and host-country research capacity. BASIS CRSP aids governments, donor agencies, the private sector, and NGOs design, evaluate, and propose policies that enable factor markets to mediate broadly based, integrated, and environmentally sustainable rural economic growth in response to fundamental policy problems. Since 1997, the BASIS CRSP work in the Greater Horn of Africa has focused on financial market constraints to, and employment benefits from, crossborder trade in the region. It has also focused on household and market constraints to food and income security in poverty-prone areas of Ethiopia.

An ongoing BASIS CRSP project in the Greater Horn is From Household to Region: Factor Market Constraints to Income and Food Security in a Highly Diverse Environment, South Wollo, Ethiopia. On 29 October 1999, a day-long policy seminar was held on findings from the market and community assessment studies of this project. Participants were researchers, policymakers and local stakeholders in the South Wollo area. With the first phase of research completed, this was an opportunity to share the results of the market and community assessment studies, invite responses from policymakers, and gather advice on how to make the project relevant to current development plans for the South Wollo zone and Amhara region.