The Employment and Income (e+i) Network of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) organises a thematic event every two years, gathering SDC collaborators and external invitees from around the world for a face-to-face (F2F) meeting. This year’s common thread throughout the F2F event is “effective partnerships with the private sector” – a timely topic that is of high relevance and importance in all three e+i domains: vocational skills development (VSD), private sector development (PSD) and financial sector development (FSD). Please see the e+i network’s concept paper for global trends and potential gains in partnering with the private sector.
Opening, introduction to the topic and exchange on own experiences
by Sybille Suter, Head Latin America & Caribbean Division, SDC
Sybille Suter welcomed everybody to this years’s face-2-face event dealing with a very important topic: cooperation with the private sector. Sybille was glad to see so many well-known faces, especially form NGO and public sector partners and the colleagues from the SDC coordination offices. In her opening speech she also mentioned the horrifying earthquake in Nepal. In this very sad moment for the SDC staff in Kathmandu and all our Nepali partners, Sybille expressed her deepest sympathy on behalf of the SDC management.
Introduction to the topic “effective partnerships with the private sector” by Peter Beez, e+i focal point, SDC
Introducing to this year’s topic, Peter Beez made clear that “only a few billions of ODA per year are not enough to lift billions of poor out of poverty”. The private sector is therefore essential to have more outreach, scale, sustainability and leverage. The interesting questions are thus how to collaborate and with whom? Development cooperation, Peter said, needs private sector partners with common interests, and potential in innovation. And to successfully collaborate with the private sector, we should try to better understand them, visit enterprise, understand their language or at least find a translator. Last but not least we should not neglect social and environmental concerns when working with the private sector.
Peter mentioned dual VSD as a great example for cooperation with the private sector – it is a very complex kind of collaboration and a political process with social, economic and individual objectives. It shows that we have to change systems and work at all levels (macro, meso and micro) with the right partners. And that these partners are human beings, individuals, persons. And finally we need champions, individuals that take risks for moving ideas into results, so called intrapreneurs.
Peter summarized that it is not the question of whether or not we want to collaborate with the private sector. It is a question of how:
by Rita Stupf, Senior Advisor and Deputy Director at cinfo
Rita Stupf then presented the diversity of the private sector from small informal firms up to multinationals. She underlined how important it is to think in systems, understand value chains, stakeholders and their incentives and finally think global while acting local. When talking about stakeholder management, we have to understand the firm’s incentives. Finally, a company should be managed to the benefits of its stakeholders. Therefore the company’s survival is of central importance.
According to Rita, we can in general distinguish two types of CSR concepts with different motivations and instruments for development cooperation:
Rita explained that the role of donors and implementing agencies in collaboration would especially consist in facilitating change while being neutral, non-biased, enabling a stable business environment, and promoting job creation and income (always working on all three levels; strategic, normative and operational management). Successful collaboration between development cooperation and the private sector is based on long term thinking and mutual institutional willingness. Common understanding and agreement on the role of each stakeholder and on joint ambitions, values and goals are therefore of key importance.
by Patrick Struebi, Social Entrepreneur, Ashoka Fellow and founder of Fairtrasa
Patrick Struebi then presented Fairtrasa, a practical example how the power of the market can be used to lift thousands of small scale farmers out of poverty. Based on the situation that small scale farmers just have to sell their products at the very moment when these are mature (and often at a very low price) he realized that organic fair trade may improve their access to global markets and higher prices. Doing so, the classic fair trade model has to be adapted to respond to the particular needs of subsistence farmers. Enabling these poor farmers to becoming competitive producer, Fairtrasa itself became one of the largest organic and fair trade fruit exporter from Latin America and a highly scalable business model.
Patrick concluded that mission driven social entrepreneurs (in all sectors: private, public) are ideal partners for development cooperation and for systemic change. Therefore we all should become social intrapreneurs within our organisations! – Patrick shared more of his energy and insight at his market stall.
with Sybille Suter, Peter Beez, Rita Stupf, Patrick Struebi
All speakers gathered for a lively panel discussion where some key issues were further discussed and they answered questions from the audience.
Learning from ongoing programs and experiences from participants: how, when and where to partner with the private sector.
Market Stalls Round 2
Remarks, findings, lessons, open questions
The PSD group visited the Chocolate Halba Factory, and the VSD group visited the gad Foundation in Bern. After a nice bus ride with a mountain-view, we all reached the SHL Swiss Hotel Management Academy in Luzern, and had the opportunity to see the way they work in Switzerland and Asia. To wrap up the day, an “Apero” -kindly offered by SHL lifted- everyone’s mood. Don’t miss the photos of the day.
A mixed day, a powerful day! The event was divided into 2 sessions: the group PSD (private sector development) met in an engaging agenda called “Improving the productivity of smallholder farmers through private sector collaboration”, while the group VSD (vocational skills development) convened to discuss and exchange about the private sector in VSD. After lots of great discussions in working groups, we joined Mr. Sager (SDC Head) for his closing message of the day, where he highlighted the equation “development = employment + income”. To top up this productive day, we went up 2,363mts up the Niesen mountain, and had our share of winter and Swiss Alps.
The last day: the beginning of the journey! It’s time to take furthers steps, to share and to put into practice what we’ve learned here in Thun. In this last day we did a recap of insights of yesterday’s PSD & VSD sessions, and there was a general recognition on the value of addressing issues on how to collaborate meaningfully with the private sector. To connect those learnings with praxis, we gathered into small groups and came up with topics, ideas and ways to move forward.
2015-04 F2F 2015
