Market systems take centre stage at SEEP 2014

The biggest takeaway from this year’s SEEP conference was the rapidly increasing experience and interest in market systems approaches, writes BEAM's Ashley Aarons.

Donors such as USAID, DFID and SDC have been supporting market systems approaches for a number of years, but I was nevertheless surprised that the theme of this year’s SEEP conference was Scaling Impact in Inclusive Market Systems, and many practitioners outlined their work to support market systems during the sessions. In one session, MEDA, Habitat for Humanity and Opportunity International discussed housing market systems and the role of microfinance. The IADB, Water for People and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation session focused on successful strategies that have been used to grow sanitation markets across countries in rural and urban contexts. And in another session, FIT Uganda, IRC and Mercy Corps outlined market facilitation strategies to enhance engagement of returnees affected by conflict into market systems in Northern Uganda. This seemed to confirm what Mike Albu, BEAM Exchange Director, said at his presentation: 'market systems have gone mainstream.'

Following this, it was appropriate that the BEAM Exchange launched at the conference given its aim to support knowledge sharing and learning about market systems approaches for reducing poverty.

There was a real buzz and curiosity around the conference floor about what BEAM was about. The launch event brought together Mike Albu, Natalie Skerrit (DFID), Ruth Campbell (ACDI/VOCA), Sharon D'Onofrio (the SEEP Network), Jeanne Downing (USAID) and Jim Tanburn (DCED) to discuss BEAM's plans and learning agenda as well as inter-organisation collaboration. The session highlighted BEAM’s aim to create new spaces for knowledge sharing, build a greater supply of market system professionals and support market system approaches in new sectors such as basic services, nutrition and energy. The new BEAM Exchange website was unveiled for participants to explore the programme in more depth, and a preview of the updated was published.

A subsequent peer learning session, chaired by the BEAM Exchange, focused on what it means to measure change in systems. Here Jim Tanburn, Sanju Joshi and Tim Tuckett (both SAMARTH Nepal) discussed their experiences in putting systemic measurement into practice. BEAM aims to take this challenge further, developing guidance and case studies on monitoring in market systems approaches.

What were the other key takeaways?

Despite the focus on market systems approaches, it was unclear how deeply they are embedded in many of the presenting organisations or if it's the latest fad. SEEP conferences have a different theme each year and a number of presenters may have packaged what they were doing under a market systems banner. The housing session which focused on the role of financial institutions, did not significantly look at broader systemic barriers. Paul Polack gave an inspirational keynote address on how frontier companies can be profitable and reduce poverty at scale, but he was only focusing on firms with the potential to reach over 100 million customers. However he suggested reaching scale was about effectively rolling out a solution that works, rather than addressing wider barriers to firm growth such as business environment barriers or supporting markets. The SEEP conference literature focused more on scaling impact than market systems.

Rereading the conference theme, perhaps it just highlights that the development community operates within system dynamics, rather than suggesting systemic change as the key pathway to large and sustainable impacts. Regardless, support for market system approaches may seem more substantial than it actually is. This makes the establishment of the BEAM Exchange all the more important. As Mike Albu highlighted, BEAM aims to not just be a knowledge sharing platform, but to consolidate this interest and drive the approach forward through increasing the capacity to carry out programmes, improving the evidence base, supporting local champions and extending application into new sectors.

How big data can help

I am lucky (unfortunate(?)) to have been to quite a few conferences and so I’m pleased when a presentation takes me by surprise and introduces me to new thinking. The plenary on the big data revolution, with great presentations from DataKind, Grameen Foundation and Mastercard, showed the potential for programmes to use large amounts of digital data to improve programming.

This could include potential improvements in surveying rural farmers via text and voice recorded surveys, to analysing the habits and needs of the poor through mobile use, to using satellite imagery to map changes in land use and superimpose this onto other data sets such as income levels and disease prevalence (see presentation left from the Grameen Foundation). This is a very exciting new area of work for BEAM and others to explore in terms of improving programme awareness of how to use big data to understand the lives of the poor, and also in how we use our own data to maximise our impact. Watch this space!

Ashley Aarons is the BEAM Exchange lead on learning and development. Post your comments on this blog below, or connect with Ashley on LinkedIn.