Many reports on pro-poor business, especially from the grey literature, call for companies to ‘scale
up’ their impacts, with systemic change sometimes seen as a means to scale, as well as impact. Yet
there is an important distinction to be drawn between systemic change and efforts to achieve scale.
Scale is about numbers. It is about increasing the size, amount or extent of a business and development approach, through working with large corporations that have a vast reach, through
partnerships, or through replicating and multiplying results. The WBCSD (2013) describes scale as a
combination of the number of people reached, geographic footprint, and sales or procurement volume. While economies of scale and return on investment are important for business, as they can determine whether ventures are commercially viable, scale implies nothing specific about development impact.
partnerships, or through replicating and multiplying results. The WBCSD (2013) describes scale as a
combination of the number of people reached, geographic footprint, and sales or procurement volume. While economies of scale and return on investment are important for business, as they can determine whether ventures are commercially viable, scale implies nothing specific about development impact.
Systemic change is about transformation in the structure, dynamics and relationships of a system.
Where business and development initiatives target systemic change this implies delving behind immediate problems or symptoms and tackling underlying causes to deliver tangible and enduring benefits with significant impacts on the material conditions or behaviours of large numbers of people, going beyond those directly involved in the initiative.
There is also a time element. Scale may be achieved in a (relatively) short period, but changes are not necessarily long-lasting. With systemic change, often the initial activities are niche, involving small and isolated impacts and unstable structures, which take a long time to strengthen and stabilise. However, where these innovations eventually drive systemic change, the result can be dramatic with lasting impacts over long time horizons.
Market systems analysis to evaluate change and transformation of a market system can be carried out by looking at 3 main questions:
Where business and development initiatives target systemic change this implies delving behind immediate problems or symptoms and tackling underlying causes to deliver tangible and enduring benefits with significant impacts on the material conditions or behaviours of large numbers of people, going beyond those directly involved in the initiative.
There is also a time element. Scale may be achieved in a (relatively) short period, but changes are not necessarily long-lasting. With systemic change, often the initial activities are niche, involving small and isolated impacts and unstable structures, which take a long time to strengthen and stabilise. However, where these innovations eventually drive systemic change, the result can be dramatic with lasting impacts over long time horizons.
Market systems analysis to evaluate change and transformation of a market system can be carried out by looking at 3 main questions:
- How was ownership in a pro-poor business initiative structured? Initiatives led by an existing company, initiatives led by a new company that was created in response to a specific development challenge, formal partnerships between two or more entities, and multi-party platforms involving a large number of organisations with broad, shared objectives are different ways in which ownership by the market actors in a system (and not the donor or the market facilitator) will lead to actual systemic change.
- Were key elements of systemic change part of the design of the initiative? Did it address issues that originate from the system and its elements (institutions, policies, relationships, resources, power structures, values and behavioural norms), rather than challenges specifically relating to the value chain and individual actors. Did the initiative distinguish between incremental initiatives around efficiency, quality and productivity, which rarely drive systemic change, and radical niche innovations that change the underlying constraints in the system?
- How have changes to behaviours and norms been observed and monitored? How have they demonstrated that change has been sustained and long-term and not short-term, ad-hoc, or with undesirable unexpected consequences?
