Agricultural production in Africa, undertaken in the main by smallholders, is a highly risky activity with poor returns. To realise Africa’s potential, there is a need to commercialise smallholder production, thereby increasing returns. But amongst a range of different inputs, such commercialisation requires greater access to finance.

Value-chain finance offers an opportunity to expand and coordinate financing for agriculture, as well as to improve efficiency by facilitating financial access and lowering agricultural costs and financing risks. Agriculture investment of this nature is being provided at different levels and by a range of private- and public-sector actors, with facilities financing smallholders that are integrated into value chains through the use of inclusive business models. Such models are therefore helping financing facilities to access smallholders, because the risks and operating costs for lenders are reduced when farmers are integrated into value chains.

Wasafiri (in partnership with Prorustica) was commissioned to carry out a mapping survey on best practices in this field by the AFRACA-CTA partnership on strengthening smallholder-inclusive value-chain finance in Africa. The study also extended to gauging the use of associated tools such as (mobile) technology and risk management mechanisms for enhancing agri-finance.

The intelligence generated by the survey is expected to inform future decision-making in efforts to advance farmer-friendly rural agricultural financial products and services in Africa.

Since inception in 2012, Grow Africa has catalysed a historic shift in private-sector engagement in African agriculture, with partner companies announcing over $10 billion in planned investment aligned to the national development goals of twelve target countries. This intent has translated into action, with over $2.3 billion invested, creating 88000 jobs, and reaching over 10 million smallholders in 2015 with new contracts, sourcing, services or training.

Wasafiri has been instrumental in the conception and implementation of Grow Africa. In 2011, Wasafiri realised that while CAADP – the African Union’s plan for transforming agriculture – was making progress with the public sector, it risked stalling unless its aspired private-sector response was triggered. At the same time, the World Economic Forum’s private sector-led “New Vision for Agriculture” was calling for transformative multi-stakeholder partnerships, but needed government counterparts to provide political leadership to advance enabling environment improvements.

Wasafiri connected these two efforts and Grow Africa was born as a partnership platform to accelerate investments for sustainable growth in African agriculture. Convened by the AUC, the NEPAD Agency, and the World Economic Forum, Grow Africa generates concrete commitments by companies for inclusive and responsible agri-investment, and facilitates multi-stakeholder collaboration to ensure this investment delivers shared value, as both commercial returns and a beneficial impact on jobs, incomes, and food security.

In addition, the Grow Africa Investment Forum offers a flagship annual event, bringing together Heads of State, Agriculture Ministers, leaders from business, farmers and civil society, and G8 Development Ministers to report on progress, highlight challenges, and showcase opportunities for investment and partnership (see video).

Grow Africa has contracted Wasafiri to provide programme support since its inception, including:

  • Strategy development, team coordination and programme management
  • Stakeholder engagement, especially with farmer organisations, domestic companies, African institutions and donors
  • Facilitation and communication support at Grow Africa Investment Forums, including event reports
  • Managing stakeholder engagement in Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda and Malawi.
  • Producing Grow Africa Annual Reports, to the acclaim of international leaders
  • Developing and maintaining Grow Africa’s first website
  • Securing donor finance worth over $10 mn.
  • Devising a comprehensive M&E strategy
  • Facilitating the Smallholder Working Group, a network of pioneering companies seeking to work with smallholders to make them more profitable an productive.
  • Researching and writing briefing papers on key topics such as Smallholder Delivery Models or Fertiliser Subsidy.

For Wasafiri, Grow Africa provides evidence that our approach to systemic change works. Grow Africa’s alignment of political and commercial interests and its unprecedented cross-sectoral collaboration have combined to generate the commitment, intelligence, direction and action required to deliver change at scale.

Its rapid progress also means this action-oriented partnership-based approach is inspiring the design of initiatives to tackle systemic challenges in other contexts, such as Grow AsiaPower Africa, Move Africa and the Zero Hunger Challenge. As the world looks to new collaborative approaches for delivering the SDGs, papers from the World Economic Forum  and the Harvard Business Review cite Grow Africa as powerful model for transformative, systemic leadership.

In 2011, the World Bank had ranked Rwanda’s statistical capacity as 10th in sub-Saharan Africa. By 2012, the country had jumped to being second only to Mauritius. The intervening year saw Wasafiri embedded within the National Institute of Statistics to manage a change programme that would transform Rwanda’s capacity to manage statistics.

Monitoring a country’s development progress requires a variety of socio-economic data. Until 2005, this was collected in Rwanda by several institutions under different government ministries. The National Institute of Statistics (NISR) was then created to establish a more integrated approach, with a UNDP-managed basket fund set up to support its implementation.

However, NISR performance fell short of stakeholder expectations due to a number of shortcomings, including poor budget execution, no release calendar for producing quality data, inadequate coordination of statistical activities, and limited dissemination of statistics.

In 2010, the Institute launched its National Strategy for the Development of Statistics (NSDS), complete with a now NISR-managed basket fund for implementing the 5-year plan. This posed a question of how a young institution with limited management capacity and only 50% of staff in post, could effectively raise and manage around US$80 million where the better-resourced UNDP had not succeeded?
Rwanda-National-Agriculture-Survey

One of Wasafiri’s Principal Consultant’s, Liberal Seburikoko, was embedded in to NISR and led the transformative change required to ensure the plan’s successful implementation.

Our starting point was to hold one-to-one consultations with all key internal and external stakeholders to assess the prevailing situation, whilst identifying opportunities for forging authentic partnerships. We then embarked on a clear systemic change agenda, focusing from the outset on empowering identified champions of change to drive the process.

Throughout our engagement, we focused on shaping new behaviours at all levels (e.g. more disciplined budgeting and planning, and improved accountability and delegation), with flexibility and adaptability also encouraged within the NISR and among donors. Finally, we developed management tools and frameworks to transition from capacity enhancement to an enduring legacy of actionable mechanisms.

The outcome has been extremely rewarding, with the NISR now perceived as an institutional role model both locally and abroad, drawing positive assessments from auditors and stakeholders alike, and securing additional resources from newly-interested non-traditional sources. The NISR is now on course to breaking yet another record, by releasing its 2012 Census results six months ahead of schedule.

The way in which aid is delivered is critical to its impact on reducing poverty and increasing poor people’s access to services. Aid is more effective when the development of policies, plans and their implementation, and budgets are led by the partner country not the donor. This strengthens ownership, the first principle of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. Ownership requires concerted effort by all donors and the partner country or institution to transfer power and enhance accountability. It involves both ‘camps’ letting go the old ways of working.

Over the last 11 months or so, I have witnessed an impressive transformation process for the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR) as it implements its first ever 5-year National Strategy for the Development of Statistics (NSDS). It is incredible what NISR have so far achieved with only around half of the staffing complement. In the past NISR struggled to follow the pace of its development partners in terms of planning and executing the agreed plans and budget. In a twist of circumstances, the development partners seem to be struggling to follow NISR’s pace. Besides the tremendous support from donors and the government, it took committed leadership that ‘sees’ where NISR needs to be and a resolve to ‘pay the price’ to get there.

The price tag: stronger accountability and letting go

NISR had an earlier strategic plan (2007-2010) that was implemented through pooled funding by DFID, EU and UNDP. The Basket Fund was managed by UNDP on behalf of other donors. There were lots of issues with absorption capacity of funds and effective implementation of projects and activities. The key problem in my view was a kind of laisser-faire approach to management that failed to effectively challenge poor performance and ineffective behaviour, and an inability to adequately manage talent. The turnover was high and some of the most experienced staff tended to be ‘poached’. NISR restructured and increased its staffing complements from 50 to 100. The new management took the bull by the horns. Status quo was no longer an option: accountability was strengthened despite some internal resistance.

Ownership came with a price tag for some donors too: letting go of their ‘power’ to drive their agenda. When the NSDS was approved, a new Basket Fund was set up to support its implementation. A critical decision was made: NISR (not UNDP) would manage the Basket Fund. It so happened that UNDP would not put its resources into the new Basket Fund. The reason – their policy for pooling funds is that UNDP or another UN agency has to manage the pooled funding. The World Bank (WB) indicated formally that it would be joining in early 2010, but as yet the basket fund has not received any financial support from them. In my view, their struggle was that the WB’s decision-making seemed to be centralised in Washington and NISR lacked an interlocutor on the ground with delegated authority to move the process forward.

At times, NISR’s momentum was frustrated by the slow response from donors. The NSDS was underfunded and NISR spent a lot of time negotiating with some donors on what had been already agreed instead of delivering. Eventually, the WB decided to ‘decentralise’ the Task Team Leader position for our programme from a Washington-based staff to a Rwanda-based one. Things seem to be moving faster now and NISR may see the colour of WB money before the end of this year.

I concluded that letting go of ‘old’ habits and ways of doing things was the greatest impediment to effective ownership.

Biting the bullet to make it happen: some success stories

With the money from the WB not coming, and the need to procure vehicles that were needed for the preparatory activities for the Population and Housing Census, a mega operation that covers all households in the country and occurs every 10 years, NISR devised a plan B. The EU agreed that NISR could use its resources to buy these vehicles. This was important as some US$ 1 million was tied with our executing fully the previous allocation. And these vehicles had to be delivered by 31 December 2010 to meet the EU requirements. It was practically impossible to go through the normal open tendering process and get the vehicles by that deadline. Failing to absorb these resources would affect future disbursements next year and NISR had huge funding gaps. NISR decided to go unconventional – make a case for a waiver to single source, got approval from the relevant authorities, and negotiated hard with the supplier. On 30 December 2010, all the 20 vehicles were parked in NISR compound and the cheque paid. NISR is still dealing with challenges from disgruntled vehicle dealers (rightly so) but I am still convinced that it was the right decision for the public interest.

Another success story relates to the fourth Demographic and Health Survey (DHS4). UNICEF was funding the lion’s share of the DHS4 project. In my meeting with UNICEF shortly after I joined NISR, I was informed that NISR was not properly accounting for advances received and this would lead to freezing further disbursements if not addressed by November 2010. NISR had not even drawn 20% of the budget at that time. This would bring to a halt the survey – and both UNICEF and NISR would be seriously in trouble. I could identify very well with the situation UNICEF was in as I used to manage project resources when I was working with DFID. It was frustrating to have to ‘lose’ funds that were meant to improve the lives of the poorest of my fellow citizens just because some official did not do what he or she was paid to do.

Two months later, the inevitable almost happened. I received an urgent email from UNICEF informing me that the funds would be frozen the following day. NISR needed to have accounted for all the advances and request the remaining balance. I had been led to believe that this had been already sorted. A crisis meeting was convened at NISR and UNICEF was invited. We eventually reached a compromise that somehow ‘humiliated’ the acting Director General. I explained to her the cruel dilemma: she accepts the terrible responsibility or the DHS4 stops. She bit the bullet and personally committed in writing to clearing all outstanding balances and holding monthly meetings between UNICEF and NISR. In exchange, UNICEF disbursed the final tranche even before we had fully cleared the previous advances. This required great flexibility from UNICEF and acknowledgement of our responsibility in the failure to comply. Just a few months afterwards, NISR was reporting a zero balance to UNICEF, and in June 2011, we released the preliminary results for the DHS4 that showed fantastic progress against health indicators over the last 5 years or so. On reflection, although the ‘ownership’ price was very high for both UNICEF and NISR, it was a price worth paying.

 

The context: The world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are the ones most affected by Climate Change. Yet they bear little responsibility for humankind’s contributions to the problem. Achieving a fair and legally-binding deal from multilateral climate negotiations has become quite simply an issue of survival for the most vulnerable.

Wasafiri’s role: Wasafiri consultant Liberal Seburikoko has been contracted to lead Climate Analytics’ work in Africa, providing LDC’s with real-time, cutting-edge scientific, political and strategic support for global Climate Change negotiations.

Generating action: The capacity of Africa’s poorest countries – those most affected by Climate Change – to negotiate a fairer deal at global Climate Change forums has been greatly increased by Liberal’s work. LDCs are in a stronger position than ever before to ensure their interests as considered alongside those of the world’s richest nations.

The context: With three-quarters of Africa’s poor living in rural areas and depending on agriculture for their livelihoods, governments recognise that boosting agricultural productivity offers a key strategy for alleviating poverty and hunger. In 2009, the African Union’s plan for agriculture (CAADP) reached critical momentum with 20 countries working on new robust plans for agriculture. At the same time, the international community sought avenues through which to invest in tackling the food crisis, which now means 1 billion people, are hungry. CAADP provided a great opportunity, but only if African governments and Development Partners could establish ways of working together.

Wasafiri’s role: Wasafiri consultant Ian Randall, pulled together a team including Liberal Seburikoko, to facilitate a meeting at the UN in Addis Ababa, through which 18 African and 15 donor governments came to a common agreement on how to work together on CAADP. The resulting guidelines can be downloaded here. Since then Ian has worked for DFID, GIZ and USAID to support co-ordination between Development Partners as they align behind CAADP.

Generating action: The meeting was dubbed “The Addis Consensus” and heralded as a watershed moment in effective partnership by the international community to tackle the food crisis. Many African governments are developing strong agricultural plans that look set to receive additional donor finance. In Rwanda, the CAADP plan has seen agricultural growth leap from .7% to 15% and donors recently pledged a further $83 million.

Ian Randall facilitating a session

Ian Randall facilitating a session