Actionable insights for delivering systemic change
We bring innovations that help you to design, measure,
and adapt solutions for systems-level change.
Explore Services
Tailored approaches and expertise to help you achieve your vision.
Action Research:
Understand the drivers influencing market behaviors
If you are looking for deep insights on the factors that shape market behaviors, or are coming across economic behaviors that don’t seem to make rational sense, we can assist. We have a series of tools and approaches that we’ve developed to understand key influences on buyers and other stakeholders in market systems. We have applied these to a variety of issues: affordable housing, access to finance, workforce development, etc. We do this by:
- Understanding norms. Social norms are a key driver of economic behavior. Through our research and hands-on application, we have developed straightforward approaches to assessing and capturing changes in social norms.
- Analyzing networks. We bring “light touch” approaches to understanding networks, and pair this with an emphasis on qualitative analysis of the contributing factors to network changes.
- Unpacking influencers and decision making power. We have tested tools that help you to map influencers in the market and understand who makes decisions as related to specific intervention activities.
- Applying system health indicators. We have identified sentinel indicators that help to identify shifts in the competitiveness and resilience of markets.
“The MarketShare Associates team brought a strong sense of rigor to qualitative data collection and analysis in helping us explore the role of norms and networks on household decision making in a complex multi-country assessment. Their team of expert consultants worked closely with our teams on the ground to conduct research, interpret the results, and develop action plans. Their support helped us conduct ground breaking research, and implement concrete activities to deliver impact based on the findings.”
Scott Merrill, Habitat for Humanity’s Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter, Global Director of Market Systems and Entrepreneurship
Monitoring:
Build rigorous and lean monitoring systems for learning and adaptive management
Too often, monitoring is focused on capturing quantitative data that enables reporting to key stakeholders. While essential, MSA believes that the best monitoring systems are structured to serve the initiative’s learning and adaptation needs above all. They enable partners to capture they data they need to make decisions. We do this by:
- Cutting the time and cost of collecting data. We bring in tools like our Fast Cycle Learning feedback tool that dramatically cuts the time and cost of collecting data.
- Incorporating insights from adaptive management. The entire monitoring system is structured so that it responds to the needs of key decision-makers, getting them the information they need at the right time and in the right format.
- Right-sizing rigor. Our team is trained in the most rigorous approaches like the DCED Standard for Results Measurement but has the experience to incorporate only what is essential.
- Using a systemic approach. Drawing from our experience using a range of research tools, we help you capture the more important social impacts that you are having, at the beneficiary, partner and system levels.
“MarketShare Associates is a trusted partner for DAI on our market systems projects. MSA brings innovation to the projects in measuring systemic change and integrating learning and adaptive management into the project implementation, significantly contributing to driving systemic change.”
Bronwyn Irwin, Global Practice Manager of Agriculture and Market Systems, DAI
Service Spotlight:
USAID Feed the Future: Inova
USAID Feed the Future: Inova
MSA has developed a systemic change monitoring and evaluation approach which uses “sentinel indicators.” These indicators rapidly detect shifts in dynamics at the system level.
Together with DAI in Mozambique under the USAID Feed the Future Inova project, MSA uses these “sentinel indicators” to assess changes in relationships between suppliers and buyers in market systems, how they conduct business, and how they get information. One of the sentinel indicators we use on FTF Inova is the average Business model Innovation Index (BII). The BII consists of 13 simple closed questions, which gauge the existing momentum of innovation within a company. Using the BII, we are able to identify what kinds of changes—organizational, marketing, process, or product innovations—agricultural market actors are making to their business models (if any). While the BII alone does not assess the quality or value of each innovation, it does help assess whether businesses are making changes to their models and the pace at which changes are being made. After collecting data for sentinel indicators, the FTF Inova team used a rapid Most Significant Change method to unpack cause and effect.
Strategic Advisory:
Design and execute strategies to achieve impact
We know that planning for development impact and executing impactful strategies are two different things. Getting the plan right is the first step. Operationalizing program strategies that shift power dynamics and systems takes specific expertise and creative thought partners. MSA brings a mix of tested trainings and tools, and demand-driven support to help decision makers drive innovation and impact. We do this by:
- Getting all team members on the same page. We make sure the entire team speaks the same language and understands the overall approach to support systems thinking, learning, and evidence-based decision-making.
- Applying global lessons learned to local context. We leverage our technical expertise to incorporate global lessons learned, good practices, and cross-donor industry insights to drive new practices.
- Rolling up our sleeves. Some strategic consultants shy away from critical support like reviewing and writing manuals or drafting partnership contracts. We are there to help you each step of the process to support the ease of operations.
- Incorporating insights from adaptive management. We believe that practical insights drive positive adaptation. Our team helps you analyze data and identify practical field-tested solutions.
Service Spotlight:
DFID Arab Women Enterprise Fund (AWEF)
DFID Arab Women Enterprise Fund (AWEF)
Together with DAI in Jordan, Egypt and the occupied Palestinian territories under the DFID-funded Arab Women Enterprise Fund (AWEF), MSA designed and pioneered the Disadvantaged Assessment (DA). The DA is an innovative strategy and participatory measurement tool that maps poverty in a gender-responsive platform. This tool is one of the first gender-responsive poverty mapping tools of its kind, and is also one that is quick to administer – 10 questions, easy to use and right-sized for efficient roll-out. Existing methodologies tend to only capture households below the poverty line which does not allow for gender disaggregated poverty data. AWEF has used the tool to target beneficiaries, develop metrics and design context-specific baselines, whereby local women determine the empowerment measures by which they are being measured.
The implementation of the DA helped the AWEF team develop a portfolio of interventions that looks at women’s economic empowerment more holistically. AWEF focuses on interventions that improve access to jobs and income-increasing opportunities, but also agency (voice, choice, and control) as it relates to women’s economic empowerment. For example, using the tool, AWEF now works with garment factories in Egypt to design human resource processes and trainings that improve women’s ability to voice their grievances in the workplace. The tool helped to target and measure changes in poverty and empowerment of these women over time.
Evaluation:
Identify what is going well and what could work better
When done well, evaluations have significant power to facilitate learning and iterative decision-making. We bring evaluative thinking to help you identify what is going well and what could work better. We do this by:
- Bringing subject-matter expertise. We only conduct evaluations on topics that we understand thoroughly so that our analysis and recommendations are insightful and relevant to your objectives.
- Understanding how to evaluate difficult topics. We bring our expertise in measuring change on difficult to measure issues such as job creation, empowerment, wider systems change, etc.
- Incorporating a strong focus on learning. We thrive at structuring evaluation processes that respond to your learning priorities and provide you with the insights to determine how to structure your programming moving forward.
“MSA was initially responsible for supplying the Systemic Change Specialist position. In this role, they developed a rigorous methodology for analyzing systemic change across DFID Malawi’s Private Sector Development portfolio. Later, when it became unexpectedly necessary to fill the team leader position, MSA was able to quickly provide personnel necessary to assume that role too. We have found our work with them to be a positive experience, and their work has been very positively received by the donor.”
Eunica Aure, Senior Evaluation Specialist, Landell Mills Limited
Service Spotlight:
Ex-Post Assessment in Cambodia
Ex-Post Assessment in Cambodia
Initiatives seeking to create change using market-based approaches typically argue that they create more durable change than those providing more direct inputs into a system. However, there have been relatively few efforts to test this hypothesis. To address this, MSA obtained funding for two ex-post assessments of such programs under the US government-funded Leveraging Economic Opportunities initiative. One of these was in Cambodia, where MSA studied the impacts of the Micro Small and Medium Enterprises project’s work in the swine sector five years following its closure. This required creating an evaluation design that could both examine the evolution of the sector and assess the contributions of project and non-project factors. The evaluation yielded a number of insights into the evolution of the project-supported intervention model post-project and the key drivers of innovation diffusion in that context. This assessment demonstrated that initiatives using a market-based approach can have long-lasting impacts.
Thought Leadership:
Shaping industry thinking
If you are wanting to capture your learning, shape industry thinking or develop a new approach to a difficult challenge, we can help you. We can help you to bolster your thought leadership and expose your target audiences to it. We do this by:
- Producing influential learning products. We have a track record of developing frameworks, case studies, guidance notes and toolkits that are widely used.
- Clearly aligning communications actions and results. We help you select the right dissemination activities that will create your intended results most cost-effectively.
- Reaching your target audiences. We will use our experience and networks to ensure that you are reaching the right audiences with your message.
- Building credibility. We will support you to ensure that all of your materials are technically sound and visually appealing.
Service Spotlight:
Leveraging Economic Opportunities (LEO)
Leveraging Economic Opportunities (LEO)
MSA was the lead subcontractor to ACDI/VOCA on the Leveraging Economic Opportunities (LEO) project – USAID and Feed the Future’s knowledge generation and technical assistance mechanism for its market systems portfolio. LEO picked up where USAID’s Accelerated Microenterprise Advancement Project left off in advancing the frontier of learning and approaches from value chains to market systems. Over the project lifetime, nearly 25,000 users accessed LEO materials, and increasingly USAID strategies and solicitations have been influenced by its outputs. Under LEO, MSA produced a range of frequently referenced and applied frameworks. For example, MSA developed the Disrupting System Dynamics (DSD) framework for measuring systems change. The DSD framework has been applied on initiatives funded by foundations and the US and UK governments. Moreover, MSA reviewed and tested a number of tools for capturing systemic change, which resulted in the publication of guidance on when and how to apply them. Other outputs included a guide to monitoring market systems programming, women’s economic empowerment with a systems lens, and assessing the impact of policy interventions on leveraging private sector investment.
Service Spotlight:
Habitat for Humanity’s Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter
Bringing together decades of insights of carrying out market assessments, and systemic change and empowerment mapping tools across contexts, MSA created the Behavioral Analysis and Norms Diagnostic (BAND) Tool and the Value Network Mapping Tool that link with the Gender Roles and Decision-Making Analysis Tool. MSA has already applied these tools across various donors and sectors in Egypt, Palestine, Mozambique, Tanzania, Peru, Kenya, India, Bangladesh, Niger and Jordan. These tools help teams quickly uncover root causes, identify interventions and partners, and examine sustainable changes to empowerment and markets at a systemic level over time.
These tools were rigorously applied and adapted when working with Habitat for Humanity’s Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter. MSA conducted a design study across Peru, Kenya and India to understand how social norms affect market players’ decisions in the low-income housing market, and how these social norms constrain low-income households from making more optimal housing decisions to better their living conditions. The research outputs have allowed the Center to engage more successfully with the private sector; design interventions and activities that address deeply embedded social norms and market constraints; and recognize priority areas and sub-sectors that had previously been unseen.
Relevant Publications: