The challenge was not building capability in a single team. It was building shared analytical language and approach across five countries, five implementation cultures, and ten value chains. Coaching that was too centralised would become generic and lose relevance to each country’s specific market system. Coaching that was too localised would produce fragmented approaches, limiting cross-country learning and making it difficult for the programme to aggregate impact.
Who we worked with
Commercial Agriculture for Smallholders and Agribusiness (CASA) programme country teams — Nepal, Uganda, Malawi, Rwanda, and Ethiopia
Format
Quarterly team sessions / monthly one on one sessions, delivered over a 24 month period
What we did
The objective was to build a shared approach to MSD analysis across all country teams while ensuring coaching remained grounded in each country’s implementation realities. To achieve this, we provided MSD coaching and mentorship at two levels:
- Country-level coaching and mentorship focused on each team’s specific market systems, value chains, partnerships, and implementation challenges. Live programme decisions were used to build analytical capability and strengthen the application of MSD principles in practice.
- Cross-country learning facilitation brought market managers together around common implementation challenges. Discussions focused on the drivers of success and failure in different market systems, helping teams extract transferable lessons rather than replicate activities.
What changed
- Country teams developed a shared analytical language for diagnosing market constraints, assessing incentives, and tracking systemic change, while pursuing their context-specific interventions.
- The cross-country learning sessions produced transferable insights that no single country team could have generated alone.
- The result was a programme that could demonstrate a coherent MSD approach across five countries, while allowing each team to respond appropriately to its own context.
From the client
“The one-on-one mentorship was incredibly valuable for my role at CASA, skillfully bridging the gap between high-level MSD theory and the practical realities of managing agri-businesses in Rwanda. Our sessions moved past simple reporting to dig into ‘why’ interventions worked or faced bottlenecks. This tailored format built my analytical capability to track systemic behavior change and navigate complex partnerships confidently. For a multi-country program, the coaching architecture ensures that quality standards remain uniform across borders without sacrificing the local contextual relevance that makes market systems thrive.”
Bryan Kalinda, Former Market Manager (Rwanda), CASA Programme
Want to discuss how we can help you?
Contact our coaching team to discuss your specific coaching needs and we can tailor a package that suits you and your organisation. Get in touch to find out more about how the process works and indicative pricing.