Evaluation of The Market Systems Development Approach: Lessons for Expanded Use and Adaptive Management at Sida

The evaluation is intended to be formative and participatory, with a strong emphasis on learning from the evaluation process itself – particularly by Sida staff.

It has a dual purpose:

1. To contribute to improved MSD programming by Sida through better management practices across the project cycle.
2. To generate recommendations on how Sida can create conducive conditions for systems approaches and adaptive programming more generally.

Our overarching evaluation design consists of three elements:

1. The evaluation will be utilisation focussed to foster a strong sense of engagement and ownership of the process and outputs among Sida staff. Itad plans and implements its evaluations with a clear focus on ensuring findings and analysis are used. The evaluation will, therefore, be designed in a way that ensures timely and actionable findings and learning and supports the use of evidence to inform decision making.
2. To provide a robust evaluation of the management of the MSD approach in projects and programmes at Sida, it is important to ground the assessment in a solid conceptual framework for understanding organisational capacity. Drawing on a number of existing approaches we will view organisational capacity as a product of three interlinked factors: policies and systems; staff capacities; and organisational culture.
3. We will apply a process evaluation approach to this evaluation to identify and assess critical processes and assesses whether these processes were implemented as planned, and the extent to which this affected the achievement of results. This approach enables the systematic testing of how policies, systems, capacities and incentives are being translated into practice in Sida and the extent to which they are supporting effective MSD projects and programmes.

Image © Banana Harvest, Ethiopia Photo Credit:  Rod Waddington (CC BY-SA 2.0)