Working with the private sector for resilience in the Eastern Congo

This learning document examines one aspect of the Strengthening Livelihoods and Resilience (SLR) Activity's work in Ituri: engaging a nascent private sector in a fragile, conflict-affected province of eastern DRC. Applying MSD principles such as facilitation and development objectives in a context shaped by local militias, humanitarian actors, Chinese mining interests and a struggling Congolese state required significant adaptation of conventional approaches.

Developed for BEAM Exchange from blog posts on USAID's MarketLinks and the MSD Hub, the document is structured around four lessons on private-sector engagement in fragile and conflict-affected situations, followed by a case study of an SLR seed-company partnership that provoked unexpected systemic reactions, and a reflection on the team's inductive, inclusive approach to developing its programme methodology.

The introduction sets the scene in Ituri and summarises SLR's private-sector engagement results.

Part 1 reflects on social entrepreneurship through a Mambasa organisation exploring a commercial honey business sourcing from indigenous communities in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve.

Part 2 describes how SLR used self-selection and community co-creation to identify partners and develop a more nuanced understanding of 'good partners' and 'bad actors'.

Part 3 explores the challenges of vetting partners amid the inherent murkiness of small enterprises in Ituri, arguing that projects may need to accept 'unknown unknowns' and embrace the complexity of such systems.

Part 4 examines why non-financial support - business planning and coaching - is simultaneously more critical and harder to deliver in contexts such as Ituri, and how SLR failed to institutionalise this function over its five-year lifespan.

Part 5 reexamines SLR's hypothesis that economic development supports stability, using the seed-company partnership as an extended example: a value-chain financing intervention that expanded sales through partial-credit seed delivery but also provoked backlash.

The document concludes by arguing that lessons from fragile contexts have broader relevance - systemic change always creates winners and losers - and reflects on the sense-making process the SLR team followed to bring concepts such as conflict-sensitive engagement and systems-change facilitation into practical use.

Read the blog: A systems-change approach that built itself? Learning from the ground up in eastern DRC