When crises are protracted and economies fragile, traditional aid often falls short of creating lasting change. To address this, Swisscontact through its Springfield Center organized a series of Market Systems Development (MSD) trainings across Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan between September 29 and October 14, 2025. The goal was to equip development partners with the mindset and tools to move from short-term direct delivery to facilitating systemic, inclusive market change driven by local actors.
The initiative, supported by SDC and RDPP, was designed to align international and local NGOs and development actors around the MSD approach. It reflects Swisscontact’s long-standing advocacy for systemic approaches in the Middle East, and SDC’s vision of sustainable, locally owned programming.
Each three-day workshop followed a similar structure, moving participants from strategy to diagnosis to intervention.
The training combined concise lectures, case studies, and interactive exercises including system mapping, sustainability matrices, and role-plays. Participants described it as both eye-opening and engaging.
The sessions were facilitated by Momina Saqib Zuberi, Inclusive Economic Development (IED) Advisor with Marwan Solh, Monitoring and Evaluation Expert, whose regional insights grounded concepts in the Middle Eastern context.
In Syria, participants included partners of SDC, while Lebanon and Jordan brought together The Regional Development and Protection Program (RDPP) implementing partners, local and international NGOs, and development agencies such as Plan International, International Labour Organization (ILO), Near East Foundation (NEF), Caritas Switzerland, Leaders International, and United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
For many participants, the training reshaped how they understand development work. Instead of designing projects that deliver services directly, they explored how to diagnose and influence the systems that determine whether people and markets thrive.
Participants highlighted the diagnosis stage as most valuable, noting how it challenged them to ask new questions like “Why isn’t this happening already?” and to look at incentives, capacities, and relationships among actors before jumping to solutions.
They appreciated tools such as system and sector mapping, sustainability analysis, and the results chain framework linking activities to behavior, performance, and impact. One participant reflected:
Others emphasized how the partnership selection module, choosing the right market actors to co-create change, will influence their future interventions. Across all three countries, participants expressed gratitude for the clarity and practicality of the sessions, calling for even more time for exercises in future editions.
This training builds on years of dialogue with SDC to promote systemic approaches in the region. Together, Swisscontact and SDC identified the need for a deeper understanding of market facilitation among local partners, an insight that led to the first MSD training in Syria and inspired RDPP to extend the approach to Lebanon and Jordan.
The initiative itself illustrates the MSD mindset in action: identifying a systemic constraint, in this case it was the limited capacity for market facilitation, and bringing the right actors together to co-create a solution that strengthens local ownership and sustainability.
Swisscontact remains committed to supporting its partners in applying MSD principles in practice, advancing SDC’s vision of sustainable, locally driven programming. This training marks an important step toward more resilient and inclusive development systems across the Middle East.