DevLearn Digest 14: What can MSD learn from humanitarians?
Hello everyone,
I hope you’re having a wonderful end of year. We have a lot of DevLearn updates before the main newsletter, so let’s get straight to them.
Most importantly, we are running a webinar, with the Markets in Crisis community, on market systems resilience. This webinar will be on this Thursday, the 12th of December at 2 – 3 p.m. GMT, and provide an introduction and practical examples on market systems resilience. Sign up here! It is based on a recent learning brief we wrote with MiC on the subject, which you can download and read here.
Many of you will be aware that we are running an Advanced Training Course in MSD in April in Istanbul. This course is now almost sold out, with an applicant for every space. We are expecting a few drop-outs to open up a couple of final spaces. If you want to come, I strongly suggest applying ASAP.
Finally, we will run our ever-popular MSD and MEL online courses in May 2025. We’ll be opening applications in the coming week, so get ahead of the game and guarantee your early bird discount by signing up for the waiting list here.
Now, on with the newsletter…
What can MSD learn from humanitarians?
MSD and humanitarian professionals should work with and learn from each other. We have heard this many times, in blogs, reports, and policy documents. Perhaps unusually for this newsletter, we couldn’t agree more.
In practice, however, this learning is often one way. Humanitarian professionals are expected to learn from MSD, but it is rarer for MSD practitioners to learn from humanitarianism.
We saw this first hand when writing a learning piece about Market Systems Resilience (MSR) with Markets in Crisis. Our aim was to understand the different frameworks available and help demystify them for the average practitioner. Although MSR is useful in both humanitarian and development contexts, the frameworks themselves primarily drew from large MSD programmes in fragile contexts. Perhaps as a consequence, we found that we were mostly interviewing MSD practitioners, learning relatively little from the humanitarian sector itself.
Upon reflection, we saw the same trend in our own online MSD courses. We have a lot of participants from the humanitarian sector, who are eager to better understand systemic approaches. Our content uses a lot of examples from MSD programmes working in fragile markets – including Elan RDC and Sharpe, among others – but we do not have any modules, videos or webinars which attempt to learn from the experiences of the humanitarian sector. We don’t think we are unusual in this; it reflects a wider culture whereby we expect the humanitarian sector to learn from our work, but do not make active efforts to learn from theirs.
There are lots of areas where we could learn more systemically from humanitarianism. Some example areas include:
- Accountability to the target group: When I started my career in humanitarian aid, participatory methods, and accountability mechanisms were core aspects of implementation. MSD programmes, with their more abstract understanding of a system, can lose the benefit of direct feedback from the target group. An understanding of and accountability to the target group could improve the way MSD professionals design and justify their interventions.
- Use of cash transfers and vouchers: There has been a lot of interesting work in this area from the CALP network and other partners, which the broader MSD community could benefit from. For example, humanitarian actors are more likely to ask whether cash transfers are the most appropriate form of aid. While some MSD programmes experiment with cash and vouchers, it is a long way from the mainstream in our sector.
- Tools and standards: Humanitarian actors have sophisticated tools for managing risk, tracking shocks and stresses, and using conflict-sensitive approaches. MSD programmes can draw from these tools rather than reinvent the wheel. Additionally, standards around do no harm, accountability, advocacy, and coordination across the sector are also principles that MSD programmes in fragile contexts could learn from. The Minimum Economic Recover standards are an excellent example of this.
- Moving quickly: It’s a cliche for a reason; humanitarians move without thinking, while MSD practitioners think without moving. There’s something for both sides to learn, but I would welcome a dose of urgency injected into the side of many MSD programmes.
- Critical view of the sector: Humanitarians also bring a healthy level of frankness and critical thinking to their work. Humanitarian academia is full of criticism of the sector with regards to power dynamics, ethical issues, and the positioning of humanitarian actors vis-a-vis vulnerable populations. MSD practitioners and academics – often passionate about the value of their work – sometimes focus on assessing innovations or solutions without this degree of self-reflection.
If MSD practitioners want to do the best work they can in fragile and conflict-affected settings, they need to learn from their humanitarian counterparts. Let’s be honest, doing MSD in fragile contexts is really difficult, and we need all the help we can get! Platforms like Markets in Crisis offer valuable frameworks and tools that reach across these two communities.
Let us know any feedback, and hopefully see many of you at the webinar on Thursday,
The DevLearn Team