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IFAD program manager reviews session on rural enterprise

A senior program manager at the International Fund for Agriculture and Development (IFAD) believes significant progress has been made in discussions on the development of rural enterprise in Africa.

Cheikh Sourang, who works within IFAD’s Strategic Planning Division, helped coordinate a recent session at Salzburg Global entitled, ‘Africa’s Growth Engine: Partnerships for Rural Enterprise and Impact at Scale’.

Speaking at the end of the session, Sourang said: “We have a clearer understanding of where the gaps are and what we need to do to fill those gaps.”

Participants from the private and public sector attended a three-day workshop to explore ways to scale and expand multi-sector partnerships in Africa to help encourage rural enterprise.

Sourang said: “There seems to be a significant gap in terms of small scale rural enterprise, as they link with the production’s upward [and] downward consumption, and also horizontally with other activities, which agriculture feeds.

“It made sense that Salzburg Global Seminar in light of its experience and its record as a convener should bring together participants from different horizons to lay the ground for an interdisciplinary dialogue, which in turn could contribute to multi-sector partnerships to address the issue of small scale rural enterprise.”

Sourang is responsible for several corporate processes, acting as secretariat of IFAD’s Operational Strategy and Policy Guidance Committee.

He helps to coordinate IFAD’s scaling up agenda and the facilitation of a peer review and quality enhancement process for IFAD’s results-based country programs.

Participants who helped identify gaps in rural enterprise have helped form the foundations of a roadmap to filling them. But Sourang recognizes that the work doesn’t stop in Salzburg.

“What’s happening is that some of the discussion will have to be pursued at country level. For example, where you see the easiest kind of thing that business people are doing, they can do much more of it.”

By allowing the conditions for businesses to increase their customer base, they are afforded a smoother pathway to scale up.

Sourang added: “The challenge is building that social capital on the ground and getting those organized either in the same area, or new geographical areas, ensuring that they have access to productive assets [and] they have access to inputs and advisory services.

“You have a whole range of organizational work that has to be done there, which is not the job of the private sector.”

Sourang has a significant amount of experience with development issues and poverty reduction processes, and has successfully worked alongside UNESCO, the World Bank and the UNCCD.

He described discussions at the workshop as “moving very well”, despite bringing together participants from different horizons with different expectations and experiences.

“One major challenge is one of ensuring adequate production – adequate in terms of production, adequate in terms of quantity, in terms of quality, [and] in terms of timeliness that would allow these business people to do their job and respond to the increasing demand for the type of finished product that they make.

“At the same time, some of the participants came here saying we work for the government [and] in our countries we have an enabling policy environment, favorable to the investment climate, but we need investors to come there and invest.”

Sourang says that whilst a thousand flowers are blooming in terms of innovation, they are not leading to good enough practices to have impact at scale.

“We have a challenge but to innovate we need to do it with a scaling up mind-set basically asking ourselves before we start: what do we do next if it works?

“From the private sector viewpoint, it’s what they do all the time. They say: where have we started [from]? Where are we now? Where do we want to go? How do we get there?

“The challenge therefore is how to learn from the private sector, how they do it and in the particular case of agriculture where getting to scale is more difficult than in health and education.”

Sourang previously attended Salzburg Global for a session entitled, ‘Towards a ‘Green Revolution’ in Africa’ in 2008. A number of things are happening now as a result of those discussions. Sourang hopes this year’s session can have a similar impact.

“Salzburg has just confirmed and lived up to its reputation as a very good place to meet and have open discussions across boundaries and across institutional silos.

“It will be interesting to see what’s going to happen now at a country level, at a regional level or elsewhere in the international policy arena if there is something that can feed back into the agenda of Salzburg Global Seminar itself.”

Whilst a number of participants arrived at Schloss Leopoldskron not knowing what to expect from such a diverse group, they have since helped address an issue requiring a multidisciplinary approach and multi-sector partnership.

Sourang said: “A number of things are happening in different venues at different levels, but those are not adding up.

“[Participants have] come out of here with a clearer understanding of what they have to at country level and who they might be working with, and I think that’s what focused partnerships for impact at scale are all about.”