The MSRI is being used as a traditional monitoring and evaluation tool, with baselines and endlines to measure the impacts of projects, as well as for more active and ongoing monitoring, evaluation, and adaptive management.

The MSRI provides a standardized assessment that strives to not be overly project-specific and only requires minimal customization to the context in which it is being deployed. This will allow evaluators to compare results across geographies and find insights from much larger datasets. Since the MSRI will be deployed multiple times in the life cycle of projects with a core set of mandatory questions, it will allow for comparisons over time rather than static snapshots. Although these mandatory questions are universal, the qualitative questions of the MSRI give evaluators flexibility to gather additional data points thus capturing new insights or possible trends. As further MSRI assessments are conducted, more in-depth analyses will be possible, allowing future projects to be more effective in accomplishing project goals. Over time this will give its users insight into the sustainability of past projects and lead to additional evidence for best practices moving forward. iDE is planning to continue rolling out the MSRI in new country contexts, with the goal to establish the MSRI as a benchmark tool for country offices and other development funders, agencies, and organizations to draw upon to assess and compare market systems resilience in different environments.

The primary objective of the MSRI is to examine how robust market systems can affect resilience at both the systems and household levels and to provide more detailed information regarding future program scale-up and expansion. The concept of the MSR is a relatively new one; however, its effective assessment using a tool such as the MSRI can provide comprehensive evidence to project managers to inform future decisions related to project implementation, while also providing the project team and donors with evidence related to the impacts the project has on resilience. Given the recent publication of the USAID’s Market Systems Resilience Measurement toolkit ^[2] and the Market Systems Resilience Guidance that highlights the MSRI ^[1], this is a critical time to continue improving the MSRI by streamlining the data collection processes and by linking the MSRI to household-level resilience, as both of these have been identified as key areas for MSR improvement ^[1]. Furthermore, this provides the entire development sector with an opportunity to learn from an additional application of an innovative measurement tool to improve adaptive management and measure systems change. By using the MSRI to measure the resilience of the market system at two or more points in time, projects can identify needed adjustments after the first round of measurement and test whether the adjusted activities led to changes in the market system. The tool bridges a specific gap in the literature and practice, and in so doing may ease some of the tension in the development field between balancing short-term gains of project activities, long-term development goals, and the sustainability of projects in the age of anthropogenic climate change. In doing so, the MSRI may aid in the development field’s ultimate goal of reducing chronic vulnerability and promoting inclusive growth within the bounds of socio-ecological systems.