The role and scale of cash and voucher assistance (CVA) in global humanitarian response has expanded dramatically over the last 15 years. Ensuring it is implemented wherever feasible and desired by communities is an important consideration. To achieve this, monitoring markets on a local level is needed—both to ensure that the aid remains relevant in each context, and to be able to diagnose issues with market systems that can be addressed through targeted market-based programming.
The Joint Market Monitoring Initiative (JMMI) is a methodology developed by IMPACT, through its initiative REACH, to provide humanitarian and development actors with key data on market prices and functionality needed to design CVA and other types of market-based programming. Designed to enable the calculation of two main indicators—the cost of a local Minimum Expenditure Basket (MEB) and the Market Functionality Score (MFS)—the JMMI provides valuable perspectives on market prices and functionality while laying the groundwork to evaluate the feasibility of CVA programming.
To support its partners in using this methodology and analysing the data it produces, REACH has now published a JMMI Global Guidance Note bringing together more than 10 years of experience designing, implementing, and refining JMMIs across 23 countries.
Providing a comprehensive overview of all stages of the JMMI cycle from assessment and tool design, through data collection and cleaning, all the way through analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of results, the JMMI Global Guidance Note aims to make the approach more transparent from start to finish, enabling Cash Working Groups and others to launch JMMIs in more diverse contexts.
Curious about how a JMMI can contribute to programmatic decision making? Analysis products from active joint monitoring initiatives globally are available on IMPACT’s Resource Centre.
