On September 28, 2016, LINC’s Managing Director, Patrick Sommerville presented at the “Transforming Market Systems Conference” hosted by USAID/Microlinks in Washington, DC. The conference, was organized at the conclusion of the Leveraging Economic Opportunities (LEO) project, a three-year USAID-funded activity that aimed to support programming that facilitates sustainable and inclusive market-driven systems growth and development.

As part of the discussion on practical and innovative systemic tools, Mr. Sommerville, participated in a workshop entitled, “Beyond Value Chain Analysis: Expanding the toolbox with new systems analysis resources for understanding systems and systemic change.” He was joined by representatives from MarketShare Associates and The Canopy Lab and discussed the practical use, utility and limitation of the systemic design, monitoring and evaluation tools, including Social Network Analysis (SNA), Outcome Harvesting, SenseMaker and traditional M&E tools to assess systems health.

Mr. Sommerville spoke about LINC’s SNA tool, an analytical tool designed to map and analyze network structures and relationships and dynamics between actors. He discussed the tool’s practical application, referring to LINC’s work in mapping and designing the youth workforce development programming network in Nicaragua. Following the presentation, workshop participants had the opportunity to interact directly with the Mr. Sommerville and the other panelist to better understand each tool’s practicability and identify when the use of each is most appropriate and effective.

LINC is excited to have participated and presented at the LEO conference and to have been part of the discussion on shaping the new frontier on market systems approaches.