DAI to Present at 2018 SEEP Annual Conference in October

August 13, 2018

DAI is delighted to be presenting three panels at the upcoming 2018 SEEP Annual Conference, “Collaboration for Impact,” taking place in Arlington, Virginia, October 1–3. The conference features plenaries with industry experts, 25 member-led peer learning sessions, four donor-sponsored lunch dialogues and the third edition of the much-acclaimed SEEP Fail Fest.

The first panel, chaired by our Senior Agriculture Specialist Don Humpal, is called “Trading Up to Agricultural Transformation: Smallholder Crop Aggregation and Markets.” Panelists from DAI, the East Africa Grain Council, and Michigan State University will discuss how today’s African food systems shift to meet the needs of rapidly urbanizing populations. Trade between food-surplus and food-deficit nations in Africa is essential to improve regional food security and smallholder livelihoods. Participants will explore current and evolving models to deliver more benefits from trade.

The second panel is called “Collaborating with the Businesses: Women’s ROI in the Workplace.” DAI representatives from the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID)-funded Arab Women’s Enterprise Fund (AWEF). The panelists will discuss how to effectively calculate the value of women’s access and agency with business settings and consider how businesses analyze this data to make decisions. Presenting AWEF’s findings from its work within the Ready Made Garment Sector in Egypt, the panel will consider how implementers could identify new methods for calculating, pitching and monitoring the return on investment of women’s increased engagement in ways the private sector understands.

The session will showcase different perspectives, including donors, the private sector, and practitioner views to present a cost benefit analysis and the value for money of enhancing women’s access and agency. Participants will learn about practical lessons learned and explore a new tool for calculating return on investment on women’s access and agency in the workplace. Panelists include all AWEF partner organizations: DAI Europe, Arafa Holdings, MarketShare Associates, and DFID.

Finally, the third panel in which DAI is presenting is called “Fulfilling Project Evidence Needs: A Customer-Centric Approach to Measuring Impact.” In this interactive session, market systems and monitoring and evaluation practitioners explore the opportunities and limitations of using data collected by businesses to fulfill a project’s evidence needs. Panelists from Acumen, DAI’s Mozambique—Feed the Future Agricultural Innovations (INOVA) project, EcoVentures International, and MarketShare Associates will discuss how to incentivize and support partners to track and use evidence as it related to customer satisfaction and growth strategies, creating positive market system change while responding to donor monitoring and reporting requirements.

The Small Enterprise and Education Promotion Network–The S.E.E.P. Network was started 1985 as a group of U.S.-based nongovernmental groups that worked in enterprise development and microcredit, seeking to promote economic opportunities for the world’s poor. It evolved over the years and today, with active members in 160 countries, is a global network of diverse organizational types and geographies.

Follow news about the conference online with the hashtag #SEEP2018.