During June 2015, Kimberly Ross (Senior Consultant, CIDT) and Rachel Roland (Deputy Director, CIDT) conducted a participatory workshop in Nairobi, Kenya with key staff from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), in order to develop strategies for strengthening existing partnerships and engaging a wider range of constituents in the future.
In this workshop, the preliminary findings from a partnership audit and influencer mapping exercise were presented, draft guiding principles for effective partnering were validated, and key strategies were developed using a participatory approach. The main outputs were then presented at a Senior Management Meeting for feedback before CIDT proceeds with writing up the final strategy and related tools.
The new Stakeholder Engagement Strategy aims to help AGRA position itself as a globally respected, partnership-oriented organization that is leading the transformation of African agriculture through innovative farm-to-fork approaches. AGRA engaged the services of CIDT to develop this strategy and some related tools, under the recognition that building strong and beneficial relationships with a wide range of constituencies is essential for AGRA to have a greater impact.
AGRA exists to fulfil the vision that Africa can feed itself and the world, and it believes that investing in agriculture through stronger partnerships is the surest path to reducing poverty and hunger in Africa. It was founded in Kenya in 2006 with a mission to catalyse an agricultural transformation in Africa that impacts the lives of tens of millions of African farmers – particularly in terms of improved livelihoods of smallholder farmers. AGRA aims to achieve this by promoting sustainable, efficient, competitive and innovation-driven increases in agricultural productivity as well as by improving farmers’ access to microfinance and private and public sector investments in agricultural development.
