What does a market system specialist like me do?

Economic Development

• Develop retail networks in developing countries to get products and services in the hands of low-income marginalised consumers
• Help aid programmes do more systemic social welfare through systemic safety net programmes
• Improve the enabling environment for MSMEs and the informal sector  

Social Business and CSR

• Look at supply chain interventions that go beyond the value chain approach and take more of a systemic perspective that actually deliver benefits to poor farmers 
• Identify different areas where CSR can be better programmed by way of a market systems approach
• Integrate the private sector into market systems approaches that have historically focused on socialist mechanisms (large State, community associations, NGOs)
• Work with system actors to identify areas where market systems development will make a difference

Behaviour Change

• Train practitioners on behaviour change and behaviour change methodologies to help projects deliver systemic solutions 
• Design behaviour change tools to improve the adoption and commitment of poor people to long terms savings and investments practices

Do market-based approaches hold too many false assumptions?

This blog post from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) attempts to reflect the main challenges in implementing market-based approaches. It questions the "false assumptions" of market development and systems thinking for poverty reduction.

In fact, what is most evident is that a very damaging assumption held by policy makers and practitioners alike is that market-based approaches simply mean "business" and "market access". In fact these are two outcomes of a functioning market system - among many others - but not the end-goal. In reality, well-designed market-based approaches that adopt systemic principles also deliver the following benefits:

• Production and supply systems that respond to demand and the needs of the market so that relationships are inherently win-win and about capturing the value within the system 
• Inclusivity of poor, marginalised, vulnerable groups as key actors and influencers (including, women, youth, disabled, etc.) 
• Market resilience and the ability of the system to stay strong and react positively to economic, social, political shocks even after any development intervention 
• Innovation is from within the market itself and emergence of new products and services (both for mainstream as well as niche users)
• Better relationships between market actors and market-driven design and testing and learning so that products and services respond to market needs 

When talking about market-based systemic approaches to poverty reduction, the first step is for all parties to get on the same page. For advisors to development projects, these are some things to look out for:

• An inaccurate understanding of systemic thinking and a persistence towards value chain approaches. The former is about the structures, patterns and cycles in systems, and the systemic constraints that affect the functioning of a system (rather than any specific events or element or value chain). Systemic analyses then lead to solutions and leverage points that generate long-term change throughout the wider system (and not for any particular market actor value chain or sector). 
• Visible conflicts between projects and market partners and disagreements around 'ownership' and 'control'. There can often be a tug-of-war between 'who does' and 'who pays'. The project may be doing too much and be paying too much and can be reticent to relinquish control and allow market forces and systemic pressures to take over. 
• A lack of understanding of what a better functioning market system looks like. Poverty is often considered a 'wicked problem'. As a result, without diversity for multiple viewpoints in problem-solving, there can often be difficulty in envisioning a better future. Some projects also perceive that by formalising all things informal and turning informal activities into formal value chains will somehow naturally strengthen systems. 
• A lack of appreciation for (and a fear of) complexity. As a result, there may be a pattern of efforts to simplify, delineate, isolate and control within specific timeframes and outcomes, leading to tick-box approaches to measuring systems change. 
• A heavy emphasis on quantity over quality in project activities. In particular, a tendency to prioritise activities that promise large impacts for lots of beneficiaries as soon as possible ... over and above interventions at leverage points in the system that take time but draw people into the system and bring about sustainability through relationships, value creation, growth, feedback, market response and evolution 
• A tendency to directly intervene in the market instead of employing facilitative approaches and market-based tactics. Examples: 
• running 'project pilots' instead of working through market actors and offering opportunities for 'market exposure and idea testing' 
• dragging actors into the market through 'cost-sharing' instead of supporting existing interest and willingness for 'early-stage market entry' 
• organising and leading 'stakeholder forums' to get buy-in for the project's bright ideas instead of facilitating membership based groupings around common market constraints 
• when buying down the risk in new markets, offering a heavy amount of 'financial subsidy' to businesses instead of non-financial options such as 'networking, capacity building, coaching, information-sharing and relationship-building' 
• a lack of adequate focus on the incentives, relationships and behaviours in markets. This can be evidenced by projects that make broad assumptions about why the private sector does not already work in marginalised markets. e.g. ICT4Development projects often make the mistake that ICT constraints are primarily technical software issues, and do not spend enough time addressing the incentives and facilitating the relationships and interactions between firms and the market (mostly small rural-based enterprises).

Dealing with prejudice in social settings

Often, I am out with friends or friends of friends or co-workers or in fact, complete strangers and I am confronted by horribly sexist, homophobic, racists and other prejudiced opinions. I naturally end up confronting these people to expose the bigotry in their thinking. However, very often I leave feeling dissatisfied, frustrated, more angry or even ashamed if the group plays a dominant domineering role in society (as often happens if I am talking to white privileged male heterosexual able-bodied people).

Here are a selection of blogs and articles and thought pieces that I have found to help deal with bigotry in social settings.

• Make a plea for empathy - "For example, during a recent conversation where someone was saying some very stupid things about a trans person who had recently come "out" at work, I made the comment that. "Yeah, it can be weird, but I always think with this sort of thing that it must be much harder for them than it is for you really.." Which didn't actively disagree with what they were saying but made a plea for empathy." 
• Remember you are "an emissary from the next generation" and there are things you can do to share the Word from your own (biblical or non-biblical) gospels. This is some of the very inspired thinking behind the #blacklivesmatter hashtags on Twitter and others. 
• If you have suffered prejudice and have been deeply wounded, apply antiseptic, de-sensitise the area of attach and opt for pragmatism in building prejudice-free environments in places where you have power and control. Remember, prejudice is learned and can be unlearned. Prejudices are attitudes rooted in ignorance and a fear of differences. Work within social and commercial spaces to plan an appropriate response. 
• Set up projects (such as this one) to record, monitor, map, measure prejudice in honour of the the 'victims' and their voices and remain vigilant in the face of aggression, paranoia and hate

Article - In health, let countries run their own programmes and take a systems perspective

A nice blog on lessons learnt in global health. Advice? Let poor countries run their own programmes and take a systems perspective ...

This blog was originally published here on the Guardian website.

Lessons in global health: let poor countries run their own programmes

In 2008, Square Mkwanda found himself in a quandary: international pharmaceutical companies had just donated millions of dollars worth of drugs to treat Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) in his native Malawi but the civil servant had no money to distribute them and they were stockpiling in the ministry of health’s warehouses. “I thought, what am I going to tell pharmaceutical companies? That I let billions of kwachas’ [Malawi’s currency] worth of drugs expire because we couldn’t spend just a few millions to distribute them?”

So he talked to his minister of health and they managed to free up enough funds to distribute the drugs in eight districts. By 2009, the distribution programme had reached all 26 districts and was entirely funded by Malawi. Seven years on, Mkwanda, who is the lymphatic filariasis (LF) and NTD coordinator at Malawi’s ministry of health, proudly announced that Malawi has interrupted transmission of LF (pdf), the second country in Africa to do so.

Putting neglected tropical diseases under spotlight

Read more

Leadership like that demonstrated by Malawi was one of the key themes in thethird progress report of the London declaration on NTDs, produced by the consortium Uniting to Combat NTDs and released at the end of June. The report said: “Endemic countries are demonstrating strong ownership and leadership, in variable financial, political and environmental circumstances, to ensure their NTD programs are successful in meeting 2020 targets. Countries are achieving elimination goals, more people are being reached, and the drug donation program for NTDs, the largest public health drug donation program in the world, continues to grow.”

In the wake of the Ebola crisis and in preparation for the sustainable development goals, these success stories are important best practice examples for the global health community as it rethinks how to effectively deliver sustainable programmes. Recognising the opportunities for lessons learned, the World Health Organisation called the elimination and control of NTDs a “litmus test for universal health coverage (UHC)” – one of the targets of the new development agenda.

Other countries are joining Malawi to take charge of their public health initiatives. Bangladesh, the Philippines and India are now financing 85%, 94% and 100% of their NTD programmes respectively. Motivated by growing evidence of the impact of NTDs on child development and productivity (and as a result on economic growth) 26 endemic countries met in December 2014 to sign the Addis Ababa NTD Commitment, in which they agreed to increase domestic investment for NTD programme implementation. The Addis commitment was an initiative of Ethiopia’s minister of health Kesetebirhan Admasu. Explaining why more governments are showing interest in this work, Admasu said: “NTDs are not only a health agenda, but a development agenda too, for which the poor pay the highest price.”

These country-owned programmes come in different guises but at the heart of every successful one is an integrated, multi-sectoral approach. Ethiopia for instance requires that every partner working on trachoma implement the fullSAFE strategy – Surgery, Antibiotics, Facial Hygiene, Environmental Improvements – and not just the ‘S’ or ‘A’, on which development programmes tend to focus.

Brazil decided to include NTDs in its national poverty reduction programme, which has other development targets such as education, water and sanitation. Municipalities, who implement the programme, are given free rein to tailor interventions to best suit their circumstances (a peri-urban municipality would have different issues from an Amazonian location for instance). 

Other countries used the single funded programme they had – onchocerciasis in Burundi’s case – as the building block to a fully integrated, multi-disease programme. There the ministry of health put in place a dedicated NTD team and worked with national and international partners to build a national programme that has been immensely successful. By end of the programme in 2011, national prevalence of schistosomiasis had been reduced from 12% to 1.4%. 

Will the SDGs be the last hope for lost causes?

Read more

Country ownership doesn’t just encourage policymakers to come up with strategies to reach their entire populations with health interventions but it also enables them to practice good resource management. Mkwanda says that NTDs brought good discipline at the ministry of health. “As with NTDs, we sit and budget. And we do not segregate diseases – integration isn’t just for NTDs, it’s for the whole essential care package.” 

The story gets even better as countries in the global south, such as Brazil and Nigeria, are not just coming up with their own programmes but also funding others’. Marcia de Souza Lima, deputy director of the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases says the new funding streams will guarantee that NTD programmes outlive traditional support (a large proportion from philanthropic foundations) but she concedes it also makes them susceptible to leadership change – although recent elections in Brazil and Nigeria suggest this hasn’t been the case.

"Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid." - Goethe

Article - Resilience v efficiency: a systems thinking heavyweight bout

(The blog has been reproduced from where it was originally found on the Practical Action website here.)

Resilience v efficiency: a systems thinking heavyweight bout

By Glen Burnett, September 3rd, 2014

Sometimes, Practical Action can really get absorbed in systems thinking. We’ve been working in this space since about 2003, and some of its principles have served as the foundation of some great successes we have had. For an oversimplified approach, think of a terrarium. You have soil, plants water and air all living inside a closed pot (it isn’t considered a true closed system, because sunlight gets in, but you get the idea). If you were to adjust different segments of the system, you might see different developments: more water might mean more growth, or more growth might also mean the system burns out.

So what happens when this system shifts, and you start looking at populations? Plants become people, soil becomes the economy, maybe even water stays the same, and you consider the impacts of clean water in a community. That evaluation is a key part of how Practical Action often engages with communities. Two key features of systems are resilience, which often shows up in our climate adaption work, and efficiency, which is often considered key to creating transformative impact in the lives of the poor—because if something isn’t efficient, it will probably not be as replicable, and you lose that whole transformative impact component.

These two systems characteristics are inversely related: resilience is a trade-off for efficiency.

What does that mean? When we talk about resilience in relation to the extreme poor, we are often talking about those who are able to bounce back when they face a system shock. That could be a drought, a flood, or an economic collapse. If you think about it, resilience gets built up by being able to quickly adapt to a change in a system, and that often means there are multiple support systems created that can create the flexibility needed for that change. In the case of drought, that might mean there are several different kinds of crops that are raised, some that work better in wet seasons and some that work better in dry seasons. This could also mean there exists a knowledge base that allows for more resilience as well—you become a generalist as opposed to a specialist so you can perform multiple tasks.

Then there is efficiency. However you achieve it, be it economies of scale, or through specialization, efficiency is important, because it means you are completing a task more effectively. If you can increase efficiency, you will be able to replicate that task. So when people talk about creating transformative change in a community, efficiency is often necessary for that change to take root. Think of a treadle pump. The first time someone built one, it probably didn’t work very well, but over thousands of years, the design has been improved upon, to the point where many look very similar: they are cheap to build, easy to replicate, and in a word, efficient, given their circumstances.

These days, efficiency is a major focus in many drives to end poverty. You have limited resources, and efficiency allows for expansion that maximizes those resources. But it also means that you are developing systems that require many of your “resources” (READ: people) to specialize in a given approach. As a result, you aren’t as flexible, and your trade-off is resilience. Think of GMO super crops—they are efficient, because they can be made to resist certain pesticides, and can grow bountifully. But they aren’t resilient, because once an infestation comes along that is particularly brutal to that crop, there is no other crop there to create resilience—food prices go up, and people go hungry.

So does this mean that the world should be extremely resilient? Or should we focus our efforts wholeheartedly on efficiency, hoping to create economies of scale that are extremely good at overcoming system shocks? Ultimately, this conversation starts sounding more like one with a personal finance advisor. If you are preparing for the future, you need a diversified portfolio. Like in that terrarium, finding the appropriate balance is key, and it will rarely be wholly efficient or wholly resilient.

http://practicalaction.org/blog/programmes/climate_change/resilience-v-efficiency-a-systems-thinking-heavyweight-bout/

Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.” - Mary Radmacher