2SCALE Thematic Papers Not By Technology and Money Alone | Page 3

Introduction
This booklet contains fifteen short stories told by field
staff of the 2SCALE project about their personal expe-
riences on how their work impacted a particular person
or group. The booklet results from a regional review
and capitalisation workshop that was organised in Be-
nin in March 2017 within the framework of the 2SCALE
programme. 2SCALE (Towards Sustainable Clusters in
Agribusiness through Learning in Entrepreneurship) is a
major agribusiness incubator programme implemented
since 2012, and is aimed at promoting inclusive agri-
business partnerships in nine African countries. The pro-
gramme is implemented through an international con-
sortium, led by the International Fertiliser Development
Centre (IFDC) together with the Base-of-the-Pyramid
Innovation Centre (BoPInc.), and ICRA, an international
centre for developing facilitation skills in agriculture.
The review and capitalisation workshop brought togeth-
er professional agribusiness facilitators and trainer-
mentors from Benin, Ghana, Mali and Nigeria, who have
been involved with the 2SCALE programme for several
years. Several days of in-depth analysis of selected
agribusiness partnerships were followed by a two-day
writeshop. The workshop analysed the importance of
functional capacity (or soft skills) development in
strengthening the partnerships, which is the common
thread running through all the 15 stories that emerged
from the writeshop as well.
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The writeshop was based on the idea that we all tell
stories about what we encounter in our work, but we
often tell them orally. With this in mind we therefore
started by telling stories out loud to each other before
attempting to write them down. We asked the parti-
cipants to highlight important business breakthroughs
from 2SCALE interventions, and to focus on direct and
indirect support to the business actors. In contrast with
most project reports, we asked the participants (now
authors) to write personal stories about the impact of
the business breakthroughs on a particular person or
group. While the stories are always written from the
perspective of the author (who has supported the part-
nership as a trainer-mentor or facilitator), they focus on
activities of different players in the partnership, whether
of a farmer, a group of farmers, a processor, or private
firm. And some stories are written in the first person, as
the authors describe their own unfolding reflections on
their role in strengthening partnership processes.
The method used for the writeshop involved different
ways of getting feedback on the stories, firstly from one
other person, then from the group, and then from the
editors. On the second day, all papers were peer review-
ed by colleagues and the team of bilingual writeshop
facilitator-editors then managed the final editing through
several e-mail exchanges with the authors. Still, the
final stories presented here are those of the authors,
field professionals (trainer-mentors and partnership
facilitators) associated with 2SCALE. We respected as
much as possible the original story line, format and
logic, while also nudging them towards a final diversity
of stories. Yet, even with 15 perspectives, we cannot tell
the full story of all possible 2SCALE partnerships.
We have tried to keep the language in the stories as
accessible as possible to readers. However, as they are
based on field activities, results and experiences, the
authors use terminology that might be seen as jargon.