By early 2012, the AU’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) had helped establish over 20 Agricultural Investment Plans for countries and Regional Economic Communities across the continent. What was now needed was a shift from planning to delivery, which challenged CAADP to ask how its partners could best support accelerated implementation and thereby drive forward Africa’s agricultural transformation. This became the key theme of the 8th CAADP Partnership Platform in 2012, during which 2 days of lesson learning and engagement sessions were conducted with 200 attendees from across Africa and from the development community. Participants came from a broad spectrum of constituencies including government, civil society, farmers’ organisations, and the private sector as well as the donor community.
With a view to successfully unlocking the energy and knowledge of all participants to identify actions that would sustain CAADP’s momentum in this endeavour, the AUC/NPCA commissioned expert facilitation support from Wasafiri for the event. Wasafiri worked with the AUC and NPCA to agree key outcomes, develop a focussed agenda, prepare briefing materials, facilitate the event, and capture outcomes. In particular, Wasafiri was instrumental in structuring the agenda for the Platform to ensure extensive participation from the participants, including through the use of small-group sessions.
The Partnership Platform was widely heralded as the best-run and most interactive to date, achieving the strongest sense of African ownership for the initiative and its priorities. Among the concrete outcomes generated by the Wasafiri-facilitated event were follow-up actions identified around the themes of:
- Leadership, ownership and accountability;
- Investment financing for agriculture;
- Policy alignment and institutional transformation; and
- Responding to emerging trends and themes.
