Tom Harrison

Following a number of management roles in NGOs and the tea sector, Tom became an independent consultant focussing on private sector development and cross-sector partnership. He has completed assignments for, among others, DFID, GIZ, the World Bank and UNDP. For a decade Tom had a lead role in management of the Business Innovation Facility (BIF) for which he was Technical Director for which he supporting BIF’s work in Myanmar he was involved in supporting large companies to develop innovative business models that benefit people on low incomes. This year Tom has led new partnership development for the Work and Opportunities For Women (WOW) Programme and has undertaken a review of a market-systems programme in Zambia and an evaluation of a partnership between Oxfam and Unilever.

BIF Guideline's for Market Selection, Diagnosis and Intervention Planning

Editor's Choice, August 2015
17. Aug 2015

This month’s Editor’s Choice is the Business Innovation Facility’s ‘Guidelines for Market Selection, Diagnosis and Intervention Planning’ published on the new Business Innovation Facility website at bifprograme.org. I should declare straight away that am fully aware that I am breaking more than a few of our usual practices on the Practitioner Hub for Inclusive Business! First of all, my Editor’s Choice is strictly speaking not an inclusive business resource. Secondly, I am not in good place to provide a review in that I contributed to writing the document I want to feature. Thirdly, I am also promoting a project that I work on. I hope that even those of you who are not in the holiday mood can forgive me for these indiscretions.

I do feel I have some good reasons for taking these liberties. The Guidelines, which we prepared with support from The Springfield Centre, are the internal document that helps our teams in Malawi, Myanmar and Nigeria to develop their market-based strategies. As such, they should be of interest to both other practitioners using a market systems approach, but also to other inclusive business practitioners who have an interest in how such a programme goes about its work. It is not so common to see such internal documents in the public domain, although other such guidance is available such as the much more comprehensive M4P Operational Guide available on the BEAM Exchange.

The BIF 2 Monitoring & Evaluation Manual is also published alongside the Guidelines for Market Selection, Diagnosis and Intervention Planning. M&E is never straightforward, but for a market systems programme it poses some particular challenges. How do you measure change that happens across a complex system such as a market? While many of the techniques will be familiar from other M&E systems, the ‘adopt, adapt, expand and respond’ framework may be new to some people, and the BIF M&E team have worked hard to develop indicators for these that give a very precise meaning to these terms. I believe that even experienced M&E managers from other market systems will find much to reflect on in the Manual. Again, it is not very common to see such material in the public domain.

Readers who have travelled with us on the Practitioner Hub since our early years will also recognise the Business Innovation Facility (BIF) as the programme that started the Hub (click here to view the businesses supported by the pilot ). The new website provides a good update on the direction that phase 2 of BIF has taken, as the Guide itself shows. Take a look also at the ‘How we work section’ on the About BIF page.

For me, it is also excellent to see some of the ‘old favourites’ from the BIF pilot also on the new website. These are also still on the Practitioner Hub for Inclusive Business, but it is good that visitors to the BIF website will also be able to find them.

Since I am so shamelessly writing about a project that I am helping to manage, and to bring this blog back to firmer inclusive business territory, let me mention BIF’s new initiative which is introduced on the BIF website. This is a new company-led approach, and BIF is currently interested in talking to you if you are working for a large multinational or regional company launching an inclusive business in one of DFID’s priority countries.

MORE INFORMATION

Read the “4Ps of Inclusive Business” report for reflections on the BIF pilot programme

This blog was included in the August 2015 Inclusive Business Highlights newsletter. Click here to read more news, interviews and opinions.