DevLearn Digest #17: Have you ever met a humble MSD practitioner?
Hello everyone,
Happy 2026! We’re kicking off the New Year with a load of exciting training announcements, and a brand-new DevLearn Digest on humility in MSD (below).
Firstly, we are running another Advanced Training Workshop in Market Systems Development, scheduled for 7-11th September in Istanbul. Our sold-out 2024 course was fantastic (if you’ll excuse the lack of humility), and we’re excited to be bringing another course designed specifically for professionals with experience, enthusiasm, and passion for the practical challenges of MSD implementation. In other words, tailor-made for everyone on this mailing list! Click here to sign up and access the 10% early bird discount.
Secondly, our regular online courses on market systems development and monitoring, evaluation and learning are now open for registration, and will run in May 2026. Our courses introduce the core concepts of MSD and MEL in a fun, interactive format, and run over a month so you can take them alongside a normal job. If you have taken one of the courses before, please share this announcement with friends and colleagues – we really appreciate your support.
Now, on with the newsletter…
Humility in Market Systems Development
Humility is at the heart of market systems development. The approach calls on us to listen to businesses, government officials, and people living in poverty, and to seek to understand their viewpoints. It asks us to step into the background during implementation, allowing others to claim the credit. And MSD requires us to constantly challenge our own assumptions, seeking for evidence to prove ourselves wrong, and to quickly recognize when we are failing.
But…but…but…have you ever met an MSD practitioner? Humble is not always the word that springs to mind.
I’m not just talking about the demigods who run MSD programmes. I’ve sat in my share of meetings where intervention managers issue instructions to their private partners, or lecture them austerely on their failure to meet targets. Negative feedback can be easily brushed away – “of course they don’t want to give us any credit!” Failures can be blamed on partners lack of capacity or commitment.
We are all familiar with institutional reasons for this. Competition for limited funding, nervousness about aid cuts, and organisations with reputations to protect, all encourage us to over-promise and over-claim on results.
But I think there is something about the theory, systems, and practice of market systems development itself which can exacerbate the problem.
Start with the well-established tendency of market systems development to elevate itself above all other forms of aid. “Traditional” aid is unsustainable, unscalable, and frankly a gigantic waste of money. Market systems development may start off slowly but – just you wait! – it will triumph in the end. This may be true. But it’s not evidence-based, and hardly humble.
Moreover, there is some tension between humility and the role of the facilitator. Of course, a good facilitator should listen to market actors, learn from them, and be open to challenge. But the very positioning of an MSD programme as a ‘facilitator’ puts us outside the market that we seek to influence. Our “market analysis” is expected to uncover root problems in the market, going beyond the superficial symptoms that other, lesser analysts might see. Our “market strategy” sets out how, with just a small pot of money, we aim to change a multi-billion dollar market, creating “systemic change” that improves the lives of millions.
With all that on our shoulders, it’s no surprise that we struggle to remain humble.
I think there is no easy way to resolve the tension. MSD has grand ambitions, and, as everyone from politicians to business people to athletes have learned, it’s hard to achieve something great without a healthy dose of self-confidence.
Despite that, we need to strive to keep self-confidence in check, and stay true to our principles of listening and learning.
A lot of common advice on running a strong MSD programme is relevant. Spend time with the people who you are intending to serve, including both businesses and people living in poverty. Strip down processes and systems, and make sure decisions can be made quickly and flexibly. Otherwise you are rewarding expertise in the process, not in the market. Set up a good monitoring system, incentivise questions and doubt, and reward (or at least don’t punish) failure.
A deeper antidote to over-confidence is expertise. In my experience, humility often comes from knowledge. When consulting on my personal speciality, MEL, I’m very happy to admit doubt and uncertainty. When asked to give opinions on other topics, I often find myself over-compensating and over-stating my level of confidence. This is the “Dunning-Kruger effect”, a well-known cognitive bias.
As the complexity and ambition of MSD has increased over the last decade, implementers are expected to bring an understanding of gender, climate, and political economy, alongside core sectoral expertise. They need to understand how to negotiate budgets and contracts, provide technical assistance and capacity building, and influence the private sector, government, and other donors. It’s no surprise that, with so many demands on their time and resources, humility takes a back seat. I would love to see more MSD programmes which explicitly selected a much more limited set of sectors, approaches, or themes to focus on.
Finally, I would be interested to see MSD programmes experiment more with mechanisms that increase reliance on market knowledge. For example, multi-stakeholder partnerships, communities of practice, or collective impact to bring stakeholders together for joint learning and action. Results-based payments allow the facilitator to set desired outcomes, but leave private actors to work out the details. Integrating these approaches into MSD could acknowledge that, no matter how good our analytical skills, we can never match the collective understanding of other market actors.
Thanks for reading this far, and if you find this newsletter useful, please drop us an email to let us know your thoughts,
Adam and the DevLearn Team