Financial Rapid Assessment
The Financial Rapid Assessment (FRA) is a globally applicable tool designed to rapidly assess the business capacity of seafood enterprises.
To better understand the capacity of fisheries and seafood enterprises, Wilderness Markets and SmartFish AC developed protocols for assessing fisheries’ investability for the World Bank and Mexican fishing coops’ business, organizational, and operational performance, respectively. The FRA combines these to provide insight about the ability of a fishing organization to perform as a fishing and/or seafood business and about their position relative to their competitors.
The FRA is one of the three foundational components of the Triple Impact Fisheries Evaluation Framework.
The tool uses basic tenets of organizational capacity development, similar to assessments from the FAO and USAID as well as the foundations of credit analysis that a lender would use to evaluate an enterprise.
The FRA evaluates capacity indicators within three principles:
- (1) Organizational capacity
- (2) Operational capacity
- (3) Current market position
The FRA provides an objective way to rapidly and efficiently quantify the key business attributes of a seafood enterprise.
Ensuring that seafood enterprises have support from civil society, access to good logistics and infrastructure for market access, and strong partnerships with local businesses will reduce the risks associated with fishery improvement and contribute to the durability of improvement.