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. 3 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.