Sustainability, effectiveness and scale
Effectiveness, sustainability and scale are significant concepts in development, but they take on a unique meaning for market systems practitioners.
Once you have your initial strategy design and market diagnostic, it is time to design a vision for a more effective market system based on these three concepts.
Effectiveness can be defined as a programme’s ability to create meaningful behaviour change across a market system by working with a limited number of partners. An informed programme can leverage key relationships to achieve greater impact with the same number of project resources as its direct delivery counterpart.
Sustainability is the capability of a market system to continue to adapt and provide the means for poor women and men to derive social and economic benefits beyond the period of intervention. This is different from the sustainability of any one model or way of working. For example, one coffee buyer and one cooperative having a pre-determined contractual relationship that stays in place forever. Sustainability in market systems approaches reflects a state at which markets are more responsive to the needs of the poor. This concept shares attributes with thinking on resilience as opposed to continuation.
Developing a credible vision of how market systems can continue to function in future entails four steps:
Step 1: Take stock of the current picture:
Review your understating of how the market system functions at present,
in terms of who does what, who pays for what and their capacities and
incentives
Step 2: Develop a realistic picture of how the system will work after intervention i.e. the future picture:
Define which players will perform or pay for which functions, to ensure that the system better serves the target group
Step 3: Decide the main focus of programme intervention needed to bring about the vision:
Specify the support required to strengthen the incentives and capacity of market players to take on new or improved roles
Step 4: Elaborate a more detailed strategic framework for the market system:
Construct a casual logic linking interventions to system-level change,
benefits for the target group from economic growth or access to basic
services, and poverty reduction