2026 Seminars

Two of the most widely used approaches to fighting extreme poverty – the Graduation Approach (GA) and Market Systems Development (MSD) – have historically been implemented as parallel tracks: one strengthening households, the other strengthening the markets around them. Evidence shows both work, but each hits a ceiling the other could resolve. Graduation programmes stabilize households, build assets, and restore confidence, but gains erode once project support ends if the surrounding market and institutional systems remain exclusionary or fragile. MSD programmes reform market systems at scale, but frequently fail to reach the poorest and most marginalized households, who lack the trust, skills, or assets to participate even when markets become more inclusive.

This gap is not just technical – it maps directly onto the triple nexus. Graduation does the work of humanitarian stabilization and recovery: consumption support, psychosocial stabilization, restoring people's capacity to act. MSD does the work of development: fixing the systems, incentives, and institutions that determine whether opportunity is durable. And in fragile, conflict-affected, displacement settings, neither holds without a third pillar – peace and social cohesion – because economic interventions that ignore local power dynamics, intergroup tensions, or perceptions of favoritism can quietly reopen the conflict lines they were meant to help close.

A white paper under discussion today argues that these three pillars should not be sequenced or coordinated after the fact, but designed together from the outset – with INGOs holding a "triple function" (Graduation implementer, MSD implementer, and market intermediary/broker) as the connective tissue. It draws on field experience across Colombia, Ethiopia, Chad, Uganda, Haiti, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Cambodia, and Syria.