Better together: Joining the Allliance
The Legume Alliance is based on a strong partnership model that also views partners from an information supply chain perspective thus anticipating their roles as knowledge partners, intermediary partners, and last-mile or end-user partners. The last role in this perspective will include organizations that aggregate and group farmers into organized units for intervention.
The current complement of partners namely, Farm Radio International, Selian Agricultural Research Institute, N2Africa project, I-logix, Africa Fertilizer and Agribusiness Partnership fit within one or two of the roles highlighted above. In anticipation of possible new partners for the Alliance, could include :
- Partners with outreach programs for smallholder farmers – partners that will allow the Alliance to significantly increase its capacity to reach out to large number for smallholder farmers at scale, thus realizing some of the project targets of up to 300,000 smallholder farming households anticipated in the ASHC phase 2.
- Partners with strong thematic overlap with the Alliance objectives – Initial scoping indicate a large number of players operating in legume and especially common bean sector in Tanzania. There are further innovative communications providers able to reach different members of smallholder farming families. Where such partners exist, the Alliance welcomes their role in enhancing scale-up, reach and strengthening the information coalition of the campaign.
- Partners with input/output supply chain role – Partnerships that provide the necessary bridge input/out supply information for the campaign will be included. As such, seed, fertilizer, input and output markets partners (including organizations involved in farmer credit and finance) that are willing to collaborate will be sought in line with the ASHC phase 2 guidelines on working with the private sector.
- Research and knowledge partners – Partners bring more specialist knowledge to the Alliance or that are able to disseminate lessons from the campaign such as universities, training providers or projects working in broader extension areas
A willingness to collaborate and co-own campaign outcomes – Partners who readily embrace collaboration as a way of working on the common agenda for bean in Tanzania. Collaboration is seen in the wider sense of time, personnel, and other resources to support the campaign. Importantly interest in and support for joint ownership of processes and results is crucial this includes an open data sharing culture and a commitment to sharing lessons widely in accessible formats.