The Danida Market Development Partnerships programme is a business instrument created to promote inclusive economic growth and employment opportunities, among others, to increase trade, investment and business development in developing countries. It was designed to support commercially oriented partnerships for sustainable market development that contribute to the achievement of the Global Goals with participation from civil society organisations, private business, academia, government institutions etc.

The Market Development Partnerships had a total budget of DKK 40 million for 2016 increasing to DKK 60 million in 2017 and envisaged further allocations in subsequent years. By the time the Real Time-Evaluation (RTE) took place, five projects had been selected for funding and were formulated in 2017:

• Improving productivity, quality and working conditions in Myanmar garment industry
• Ethiopian Dairy Market Development Partnership
• Enhancing crop yield and profitability in Kenya through biological plant protection
• Supporting sustainable mini-grid development and production of wind turbines in Kenya
• Milky Way Partnership – market driven sustainable growth in the dairy value chain in Nigeria

The RTE was set in motion to enable learning at project level and at the overall programme level during the implementation, documenting interim results of the partnerships. The RTE aimed at strengthening results measurement and assessing progress towards outcomes for the individual projects. It also provided lessons learned regarding the implementation process, which was important not only for the immediate results, but also for the sustainability of the projects.

• Measured results and assessed progress of individual projects
• Compiled lessons learned throughout the implementation process
• Provided comments and inputs to various products and processes in the inception phase
• Elaborated the results framework and theory of change of the five projects
• Designed the methodology of the RTE
• Drafted the the RTE Inception Report