In February 2017, the CCDP was mandated by KPMG to undertake a research project on business environment reforms (BERs) in fragility and conflict-affected countries (FCACs), originally commissioned by the Conflict Adviser within the Growth and Resilience Department (GRD) of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID). The objective of this research is to help DFID country offices and central policy teams improve their understanding and implementation of business environment reform by contributing to the systematization of an evidence base on best practices.

More specifically, the project aims to undertake a review of the lessons and experiences of BER programming in FCASs, with a specific focus on Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. This will include considerations of when and how to initiate BER programming, the nature of reforms to achieve their intended objectives, as well as the potential unintended consequences in the face of large-scale investment and corporate behaviour, and their contribution to drivers of conflict. In doing so, the project will assess the potential implications of the identified trends and evidence on BER programming in FCASs, and provide recommendations as to how these lessons learnt could be best applied in DFID and other donor BER programming.

Under the lead of Achim Wennmann, a research team consisting of the CCDP researchers listed above together with John Luiz (University of Cape Town) and Herbert M’Cleod (International Growth Centre), delivered their report in June 2017. 

Principal Collaborators at the CCDP: Achim Wennmann, Brian Ganson, Claudia Seymour, Koenraad Van Brabant, and Kazushige Kobayashi