The BEAM Exchange was launched in 2014 with funding from the UK Department for International Development and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The BEAM Exchange aimed to “deepen understanding by practitioners and policy advisers in donor agencies of how market system approaches can be applied.” One key research topic within the BEAM Exchange learning agenda was studying the application of systems approaches that achieves the economic empowerment of women.

MSA led a research grant to conduct two field-based case studies of select market systems projects, combined with “mini-cases.” The results of this research helped explore how women’s empowerment can be promoted through market-systems approaches and analyzed how structural transformation (i.e., the process by which laws, norms, and policies in the market system are changed) interacted with bottom-up change (the process by which individuals who were excluded from market systems interact to change the system) to result in systemic empowerment.