Identifying the underlying causes of agricultural market challenges is a complex task. Given the breadth of actors and enabling environment forces — laws, customs, regulations, norms — at play in ag markets, robust methodological and analytical tools are needed to equip stakeholders to look past mere symptoms and diagnose challenges ripe for reform.

To drive evidence-based policy reform, USAID developed several topic-specific enabling environment analytical tools with benchmarking capabilities to capture and map agricultural sector performance. The Commercial, Legal and Institutional Reform (CLIR) tools and the Agriculture Business Enabling Environment Snapshot present a methodological and analytical approach that allows practitioners to conduct comparative analyses over time, generating a robust evidence base.

Check out the enabling environment reform tools below to learn how each identifies best practices to champion targeted policy reform to strengthen agriculture market systems. Each post contains practical information for the tool’s application as well as other resources.

• 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.

For more information on any of these tools, please contact the Feed the Future Enabling Environment for Food Security project.