Information provided by market actors is central to monitoring the performance of an intervention and understanding what is happening in the wider market system.
It is essential for assessing how interventions are working at an early stage, and will also be important later on where information may be necessary to convince other market actors to take up the innovation.
However, partners’ incentives to share information will be constrained by commercial considerations, and simple practical issues may also create challenges, such as making sure that partner staff understand how to collect and store data in a systematic way.
How to! Encourage partner business to collect and share data explores ways to work with partners to better capture data as well as incentivise them to share it with programme staff.
Market actors' incentives to share information
In a market system buyers can be uneasy about providing others with information on the market and their operations. Similarly, suppliers of goods and services may be hesitant about providing data that might compromise their competitive position. This places a premium on thinking through the data requirements of market actors and their incentives to share information, and working out how they can be aligned with those of the programme.
Programme staff need to explore partners’ willingness to report on progress before an intervention starts. It helps when each party is clear and open about their expectations, what information they need, and if there are red lines that define some types of commercially sensitive information that will not be asked for or shared.
Persuading other market actors to participate in the ‘expansion’ or ‘crowding-in’ phases of an intervention will likely require practical evidence that the concept works, rather than relying solely on theoretical claims about the value proposition. This will call for some prior engagement with these market actors, in order to understand what proof points are needed before they will copy the intervention concept. Obtaining this information from pilot partners may be a challenge, so it should be specified in agreements with partners.
Technical touchpoints provides an overview of a reflective exercise conducted between a programme's intervention manager and the private sector partner counterpart, to strengthen regular feedback loops and insights around common, prioritised areas of inquiry across a portfolio of partnerships.
Other considerations when gathering data from market actors
Data collection should be guided by the operating cycles of market actors, rather than by donor requirements. For instance:
- For agricultural projects, data gathering should take place in accordance with the seasonal cycles
- Projects with businesses or other organisations that produce formal accounts should also take annual business and accounting cycles into consideration to reduce partners’ data-gathering burden
- Start data collection when sufficient time has passed for change to be recognisable in data provided by partners. This helps avoid burdening partners with requests that yield little usable insights.
The cost of data collection for the programme and its partners is another issue to be aware of. Different ways of keeping the cost down include:
- Making sure the programme MEL team keeps track of all data being collected, and actively review how the same data might be used for different purposes
- Making use, where possible, of secondary data that has been collected for other purposes (e.g. use of government statistics or businesses' sales data)
- Considering the use of phone interviews in place of field visits
Embedded learning in partnerships explores the results both businesses and MSP/USAID saw from insight surveys and provides guidance throughout the partnership lifecycle - from co-creation and award negotiation to implementation, monitoring and more.