At the suggestion of ICRC, this innovative market assessment added a political economy perspective to the sustainable livelihoods framework, as suggested in this HPG Report, and used this as the foundation for both assessment processes.
A modified EMMA process was then used to look at two markets – egg production and textiles – in some detail, while a third, strawberries, was looked at briefly.
The framework is shown on the right, although the content has not been included. Click to zoom in and see how the political and economic ramifications of the blockade are superimposed onto the DFID SLF framework. This work was referenced in the CaLP research into the future of market assessment in the humanitarian sector, which can be found here.
The report itself is not publicly available, but the short answer is now widely known – that the ‘easing’ of the blockade involved allowing large quantities of cheap or second hand goods into Gaza, undermining the viability of some of the remaining productive industries.
One of the many challenging aspects of the Gaza context is the difficulty in identifying a reference point or baseline for any programme. The second diagram was also produced for this consultancy and shows at the bottom a simplified timeline for the situation.
It shows population estimates in the orange section at the top and illustrates the development of the physical constraints to fishing and agricultural livelihoods over time in the centre – serving as a useful reference point for the discussions in the document, as well as illustrating that there is no helpful ‘normal’ to use as a baseline.