Actionable insights for delivering systemic change

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:

• Beyond Building: How Social Norms Shape Low Income Housing Decisions
• Women’s work men’s decisions
• Preparing for the worst
• Hand in hand with home owners

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.

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.

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.

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.