About
Us
Australia’s Market Development Facility (MDF) supports businesses and governments to create improved economic opportunities for communities across the Indo-Pacific.
Our mission is simple: we support good business that delivers good outcomes. By backing bold ideas and forward‑thinking enterprises, we help create opportunities that will last.
MDF has earned the trust of more than 450 businesses and government agencies, working together to bring to life new opportunities that have improved the lives of over 500,000 women, men and disadvantaged people across a broad range of economic sectors – from developing Sri Lanka’s vibrant coffee industry to positioning Fiji as a global provider of outsourcing services.
If you are an entrepreneur, business leader, investor or government official with a good business idea that can deliver real impact, we’d love to hear from you.
In 2025, MDF managed 223 partnerships across 6 countries and catalysed
AUD 8.9 million in private investment.
What We Do
We co-invest with businesses to reduce the risks and costs of pre-commercial or early-stage opportunities and speed up the pathway to profitability.
Impact & Research
MDF brings rigorous analytical capacity to understand markets and measure the impact of its work.
Our routine research, monitoring and measurement generate an array of useful economic and commercial insights that assist business partners, government agencies and MDF’s funders to make well-informed decisions
Ashan Karunananda, General Manager, Thema Collection, Sri Lanka
Climate Change
MDF understands climate change to be a transformational disruption to the way markets work, which creates risks but also opportunities.
Our approach is to identify and support viable business opportunities for adaptation, mitigation and low-carbon development. We co-invest in innovative, customised climate-smart solutions.
Inclusion
Across the Indo-Pacific many groups of people – women, people with disability, youth, indigenous communities – are excluded from economic opportunities and pathways to prosperity.
This is detrimental to individuals, families and communities, but it is also a missed opportunity for businesses and economies. Potential customers, workers and suppliers are ignored, and a latent resource of talent and energy is underutilised.
MDF supports partners to identify viable business opportunities to increase the economic participation of women and disadvantaged groups and their business models to make them more inclusive.
Funding and Management
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) funds the Market Development Facility. Funding and strategic priorities for MDF are managed between DFAT Canberra and Australia’s overseas missions in participating countries. An outline of the Australian Government’s aid priorities can be found on the country pages of the DFAT website.
Palladium is a global impact firm working to link social progress and commercial growth. For the past 60 years, we’ve been helping our clients to see the world as interconnected – by creating strategies, building partnerships, and implementing programs that have a lasting social and financial impact. With a global network operating in over 90 countries, Palladium is in the business of making the world a better place.
