Vibrant and inspiring agricultural PPP conference in Rwanda
The Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), the Netherlands Embassy in Rwanda and the TRAIDE Foundation celebrated many years existence of the Public Private Partnership (PPP) program called Sustainable Development Goals Partnerships (SDGP), by organizing an international Linking & Learning event in Kigali on 8 and 9 March. Rwanda was chosen as location as the Agricultural office of the Netherlands Embassy played a very active part in the creation of the 3 SDGP partnerships and provided close monitoring along the way.
Lively two-day knowledge exchange
Participants from many different countries came to Kigali for the lively two-day knowledge exchange. The goal of this knowledge exchange was to share knowledge and lessons learned on sustainable partnerships for food security and private sector development in East-Africa. PPPs can be quite complicated so a variety of workshops, presentations, networking opportunities and field visits to various projects were organized to unravel the secrets of successful partnerships.
The people participating represented different disciplines and backgrounds (public-private, ngo, knowledge institutes) and are active in various projects in different agricultural sub-sectors, such as potato and maize, the aquaculture sector, and the coffee sector. With so much variety in expertise and knowledge it was an ideal breeding ground for learning, knowledge sharing and exchange of perspectives.
For a more visible display of the event, please watch the video below:
A snapshot of the event
At first there were concrete and personal speeches of The Netherlands Ambassador Matthijs Wolters (how can these PPPs concretely change lives of farmers and their families), the Head of the International Development department at RVO Andre van Ommeren (more learning events to come in order to unlock the learnings of often complex consortium projects, inspired by this event) and DG Nshimiyimana Octave of the Ministry of Agriculture on behalf of the Minister (these partnership programs are extremely relevant for Rwanda where the ambition is to strengthen ties between different stakeholders in the food system).
An enthusiastic Dutch moderator living in Rwanda, Jan Willem Eggink, gave an interactive and lively character to the event and gave way to the two main highlights of the event: an online prestation of Cees van Rij of iCRA (International Centre for Development Oriented Research in Agriculture) about main learnings of a research on Dutch funded SDGP and other agricultural PPP projects and Jan Vriens of DSM with an explanation about a specific successful SDGP project in which the maize value chain in Rwanda is improved for better childhood nutrition products of AIF (Africa Improved Foods).
Jan Vriens explained passionately about the AIF SDGP project which started with four people just brainstorming in a hotel lobby and in the end leading to a state of the art food manufacturing plant in Rwanda that can feed up to two million people. The accompanying SDGP project led to an impactful program in which locally sourced maize is improved and extended, leading to improved and better affordable highly nutritious childhood nutrition products. This contributed to the combat of stunting and upgraded a local sector, involving around 100.000 smallholder farmers. An inspiring example in which close cooperation of DSM with amongst others FMO, Worldbank and Rwandan government is concretely paying off.
Cees van Rij explained about the main learnings of several PPP projects researched, see this insightful video for his presentation:
Some of the most important lessons for future PPP projects were:
- Partnering is difficult and partnership facilitation is an art. This requires expertise, time and resources before and during the project, as well as a strong adaptive mindset
- Capacity development on functional skills of project partners (f.e. regarding communication, expectations, conflict management) enables more alignment, flexibility and joint learning in the partnership
- The distinction between partners and beneficiaries can reduce transparency and trust. All partners are beneficiaries (one way or another). Be concrete about each-others benefits.
After the plenary part a lot of projects and themes were interactively discussed in smaller groups, zooming in more concretely on aspects of the above presentations. The second day was field visit day to make it even more concrete with visits to a potato SDGP project called Increased Potato Value Chain Efficiency and a horticulture company called Pride Farms.
Partnerships even more important in the future
All in all, with the shift in The Netherlands from value chain thinking to food system thinking, projects can become more complex as the reach and impact of projects should be broader. This makes partnerships even more important in the future and key lessons on how to organize successful partnerships are even more important to take into account.
Being aware of these lessons will enable program designers to still keep it as simple as possible, as the pitfall is to come up with too many rules and regulations to capture all relevant food system aspects in every single project.