In October, the Vikara Institute hosted the Market Systems Symposium (MSS) 2024 in Cape Town, South Africa, and for the first time, LINC served as an official partner of the event.
LINC team members Patrick Sommerville, partner and co-founder; Meghan Bolden, Technical Director; and Bersabeh Beyene, Chief of Party (COP) of the LINC-implemented USAID/Ethiopia Resilience Learning Activity (RLA) attended the event and were active participants in the different sessions and discussions that took place.
Thought Leadership in Action
One of these discussions was in the “Impact Leverage through MSD Collaboration: Global Case Studies” panel. This panel sought to share collaboration cases that shed some light into “how practitioners and donors are managing disincentives and fostering more effective collaborations,” given that “collaboration remains difficult as traditional project-based accountability measures provide substantial disincentives to effectively collaborate.” By providing specific examples of collaboration from projects implemented in East African countries, the panel hoped to answer questions like, “What does it [collaboration] really mean?” and “Why is collaboration critical to market systems change?”.
LINC’s Bersabeh Beyene was one of the panelists in this session. In her presentation, she shared how collaboration has been a key component and driver of RLA in Ethiopia and the resilience agenda. She began by explaining that Ethiopia/RLA was designed to fill in the knowledge gap between the individual USAID offices’ investment and activities and the collective impact that they had the potential to generate.
To address this complexity, Ethiopia RLA needed to bring together and initiate a conversation among the network of resilience implementing partners in Ethiopia. To achieve this, RLA launched a collaborative process to establish a learning agenda and identified tools and processes for the network and the community to learn collectively. One of the methods that RLA used was Communities of Practice (CoPrs). Specifically, RLA piloted issue-based, time-bound communities of practice to help answer specific resilience-related questions. One of the CoPrs established last year was on the topic of Market Systems Resilience in the Somali region of Ethiopia.
The implementation of the Somali Region Market Systems Resilience CoPr allowed RLA to test how partners and stakeholders can collaborate to address specific market systems constraints. A key takeaway from the implementation of this CoPr was that a single issue can still be too broad and that, when necessary, what is understood as a single issue may still be disaggregated into specific subsectors with distinct challenges that need to be collectively addressed.
LINC’s Patrick Sommerville was also a panelist in the “Innovations in Systemic Research, Monitoring & Decision-Making” session, which sought to “tackle the challenges of measuring systemic change within the tension between donor accountability and systems-thinking approaches.” During the session, Patrick discussed important distinctions between strengthening systems and resilience. He also discussed boundary-setting when mapping out a systems change intervention and the importance of carefully thinking through a systems change objective, identifying leverage points, and incorporating adaptive feedback and processes into project implementation.
Supporting Local Actors
In addition to participating as panelists, LINC and its team proudly facilitated the attendance and participation of representatives from two local organizations: the Gerry Roxas Foundation (GRF) from the Philippines and Corporación ECOSS from Colombia. Both GRF and ECOSS are members of the USAID-funded Communities of Practice for Effective Partnerships (COPE) Activity, of which LINC is also a partner. As a mission-driven organization, we consider the participation of local actors in international forums, like the MSS, a key element that contributes to enriching the conversations and strengthening the local actors’ capabilities.
At LINC, we value events like the Market Systems Symposium as they provide an opportunity to share insights from our experiences and learn from our colleagues in international development. The conversations that take place contribute to understanding what is and is not working, assessing the direction we are going in, and recognizing how far we’ve come in addressing international development problems through a systems-thinking approach.
USAID’s CLA Case Competition Finalist
LINC, ECOSS, and Gerry Roxas Foundation’s case, “Creating a Community of Local Systems Practitioners to Address Local Development Challenges Using Systems Thinking,” is one of the finalists in the 2024 USAID CLA Case Competition.
This post was authored by Stephanie Lacouture.
