The SEEP Network

The SEEP Network (The Small Enterprise Education and Promotion Network) is a non-profit organization that acts as a network for practitioners working in microenterprise development and microfinance fields. Founded in 1985 by Elaine Edgcomb and Candace Nelson and sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation,Citi Foundation,USAID, and Omidyar Network, The SEEP Network since then has developed into a global learning community of 124 member organizations.

SEEP documents and gathers the experience of practitioners through its Working Groups, made-up of self-selected individuals, they serve as the vehicle for SEEP members to engage in participatory research, applied learning, documentation, and training on a particular topic. Some of the working groups include: Poverty Outreach Working Group, Social Performance Working Group, Consumer Protection Working Group, and Market Facilitation Initiative. The research accumulated through the Working Groups is disseminated via various publications, training tools, as well as SEEP Communities of Practice. Each Community of Practice provides practitioners an opportunity to collaborate on particular areas of shared interest while ensuring cross-collaboration between Communities where priorities or programs overlap and align. Currently there are three overlapping Communities of Practice: Financial Services, Enterprise Development, and Associations along with many cross-cutting initiatives.

PLP was developed by the SEEP Network to engage practitioners in a collaborative learning process to document and share findings and help identify effective and replicable practices and innovations. The PLP is a process oriented program rather than an output oriented program as it emphasizes on the lateral learning opposed to producing documents or deliverables. The outputs produced are practically written, as peer-to-peer “how-to” guides, technical notes, case studies, and even a periodic newsletter to maximize their effectiveness with practitioners and the industry at large. The PLP’s comparative advantage – practicing locally, sharing globally – is based on working with on-the-ground organizations to test strategies in institutional settings common to many practitioners. Furthermore, this model of “learning by doing” has the added benefit of more institutionalized knowledge, because when practitioners learn from their own experiences, mistakes and discoveries, the learning itself is often more sustainable.