The document outlines a framework for assessing market sustainability, defined as the capability of market systems to ensure ongoing access to goods and services for poor people after intervention periods. Key steps include recognizing sustainability in market assessments, understanding current market functions, identifying interconnected markets, and considering both given and open factors that influence market systems. The sustainability matrix serves to formally operationalize these concepts by linking various functions and players within the market.

1. Key M4P principles and framework: sustainability matrix
Definition of sustainability: the market system capability to ensure that relevant, differentiated goods and services
continue to be produced and/or consumed by poor people beyond the period of intervention.
Putting it into practice: key steps
Step 1: Recognise sustainability as part of market assessment - as facilitators’ understanding of a market system
develops they need to think through how the market might work more effectively in the future
Step 2: Understand the current picture of the market - what functions – core, rules and supporting functions – are
being performed by different players and who is paying for them?
Step 3: Identify and analyse interconnected markets - understanding the current market picture often leads to the
identification of an interconnected market as a supporting function
Step 4: Take account of the ‘given’ factors influencing a future view of market systems - the nature of the market,
its historical context and the innovation landscape beyond the market in question
Step 5: Take account of the ‘open’ factors shaping a future view of market systems - capacity and incentives,
which can be shaped directly by interventions
Most market development facilitators have a strong intuitive sense of sustainability – M4P’s emphasis on
stimulating local ownership and light touch facilitation stems from a concern with sustainability. The matrix is a
more formal way of operationalizing this concern. The purpose of the sustainability matrix is to link functions and
players, as shown by the figure below: