This conference will take place on 19 and 20 May 2016 in Lusaka, Zambia and is organized by the Building Effective and Accessible Markets (BEAM) Exchange. It is an opportunity for those engaged in the development of market systems to learn from each other’s experiences and reflect on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. The BEAM conference is built around a mix of keynote papers, plenary discussions and smaller sessions on two themes: i) evidence – What do we know about the impact on poverty, the scale, the sustainability and the resilience of results achieved by mature programmes that adopted a market systems approach? How can we improve our evidence base? and ii) innovation – What are we learning from programmes that use a market systems approach to improve access to basic services, address acute economic exclusion, or achieve results in fragile or crisis-affected environments?