LIFT hosted a morning seminar about Market Systems Development on February 29th, instigated by Fund board member, Karin Eberhardt from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).
This ‘crash course’ in Market Systems Development was led by Marcus Jenal and Dr Shawn Cunningham from Mesopartner. Jenal is part of the team who is running the BEAM exchange (www.beamexchange.org), which is a DfID and SDC-supported knowledge platform and online forum for practitioner exchange on market systems development.
In a mix of theory with practical examples, Jenal and Cunningham together with Fahad Ifaz from Care International discussed the importance of thinking of markets in holistic terms of systems. Ifaz is project director of a new SDC-funded market systems development project in Mon State called GRO Myanmar.
Shawn Cunningham set the theoretical stage presenting the factors required for markets to work. He considered five factors: property rights; systems to enforce rights, rules that enable trust; free information flows; competition; and the curtailing of negative external effects. Cunningham also mentioned why markets can fail and presented practical examples.
Fahad Ifaz presented the work that Care is doing in the rubber sector in Mon State, where the implementation of Mesopartner’s approach and support is used to work towards an increase in the supply of quality rubber to improve the livelihoods of the small scale rubber farmers.
The speakers ended the session by presenting a tool called “systematic competitiveness”, which looks at the economy of value chains through four different lenses: micro, meso, macro and meta. For more information please contact Marcus Jenal at mj@mesopartner.com
One of the participants, Derek Glass, who is Program Director for ADRA, said that the seminar was “very useful, as we all work in similar sectors. Short sessions like these offer valuable tools and an opportunity to speak to specialists who can provide ideas for our own projects.”
The presentation is available here.
