Practitioners admit their challenges and failures, and learn from each other at the BEAM Nigeria workshop.
The second BEAM peer workshop focused on bringing practitioners in Nigeria together to share experiences of implementing market system approaches. I found the event very inspiring both in terms of finding out about all the exciting and powerful ways programmes are supporting market systems and reducing poverty, and also hearing practitioners open up, admit their challenges and failures, and learn from each other.
Effectively collaborating with the private sector
Like the first peer workshop co-organised in Tanzania earlier this year, I was struck by the extent to which programmes are learning about markets and developing effective collaborations with the private sector. In Nigeria this is not just happening in agriculture, but across basic services and industrial markets too. Participants outlined the 'offer arsenal' (a phrase I'm grateful to Engineers Without Borders Canada for introducing) to incentivize businesses to develop more pro-poor business models, agreeing on the value of starting with light touch activities and moving up to more heavy activities, such as grants and guarantees, if there is a clear need and value. Where these activities are used, participants were clear they should be ‘smart subsidies’ – one-off strategic payments to overcome key initial barriers rather than ongoing business support. Challenges were still highlighted, from how to make paperwork manageable to questions on what types of risks programmes are trying to buy down.
Progress in reaching scale
Programme impacts are reaching significant scale in Nigeria as other businesses crowd in and wider market systems change. How to reach scale was the main topic of the third day and I recommend presentations from Kevin Billing at GEMS1 on overall programme strategies for reaching scale and Al-Habib Onifade at MADE on the day to day tactics. I was surprised (and heartened) to see that reaching scale was not so much seen as about, following great pilots, developing supplementary interventions with other market actors to embrace and build on the new business models.
This is perhaps more necessary in more remote ‘thin’ markets where there are fewer firms and more market failures. Instead, the focus in Nigeria was on tinkering the original business model until it’s right (and dropping interventions where needed) and then relying on the size of the demand and natural business behaviour, while lightly facilitating other market players through sharing results and linking with other programmes. Not everyone agreed with such an organic process, and further discussion on the tactics involved in moving from pilot to scale would be valuable.
Further consideration needed on feasibility
Significant challenges were also fleshed out at the workshop that are worthy of further reflection. Two broad challenges struck me most. Firstly, programme and intervention design do not give enough attention to feasibility. Some interventions were competing against large-scale government subsidies or other donor programmes (sometimes from the same donor and/or implementing agency) providing direct delivery of goods or support to market actors. Taking the former first, programmes should not necessarily avoid working with governments – far from it. Working with government agencies is likely to be key to all interventions, however it can be riskier and require more time than working with businesses. These are concerns programmes needs to consider. Programme overlap is a continuing issue which we as a community have to be better at. BEAM has a role here, and we are working on a programme database to show where programmes are and help programmes share information.
Lack of investment in staff training
Secondly, there is a critical lack of investment in staff training. Only 20 per cent of participants had received formal training on market systems approaches, and a similarly low number had attended a peer workshop. This is not to say formal training is essential - much learning happens on the job - but under investment in staff can compromise the capacities of programme staff. Donor agencies, implementing agencies, capacity building suppliers and BEAM need to look at why this isn’t happening as a priority.
To discover more about the event – including a new business benchmarking mobile App; insights from one of the world’s first education programmes using a market system approach; the intervention where M&E costs were double the intervention’s cost; the 3-step attribution process GEMS4 is using, and more - read the full report.
What next?
The event worked well, participants can share what they learnt with their programmes and the personal networks developed can be a source of advice in future. There was support for repeating the workshop, and having these events more regularly and formalised within the market system around programmes using market system approaches. The question increasingly for me and BEAM is how to influence the market system to do that.
Read the report for more on the Nigeria workshop.
Ashely Aarons is the BEAM lead on policy and practitioner learning.
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