GA and its co-founders have extensive experience in capacity building along the whole value chain as well as in blended financing that supports thriving within it. GA’s founders include for example SEKEM, which has built the most successful regenerative business group in the MENA region (Middle East North Africa). Under its own brand that successfully competes with local and global brands such as Unilever, it produces products in organic food, pharmaceuticals, apparel, toys and furniture. It also created Heliopolis, the region’s largest sustainable development university and other farm training units that provide support for thousands of farmers who transition to regenerative agriculture and participate in added value creation. Another co-founder of GA is NOW Partners Foundation whose Managing Partners created the USA’s first fully accredited MBA in Sustainable Management and around the world many leadership programs for farmers and foresters, social entrepreneurs, government, business and civil society leaders, bankers and investors.
GA combines this international experience with local understanding and praxis which is provided by GA’s local partners who are successful practitioners. They help farmers and foresters to co-innovate locally adapted solutions that support them to generate better and more diverse and resilient incomes.
GA works with farmers, foresters and their organizations supporting them to develop concrete business initiatives across the full value chain. This may start with innovation in their cultivation methods that increase productivity, resilience and profitability and may include additional mechanization and technology use. It can include various types of value addition, brand development, marketing and access to public and private markets.
If funding is needed to achieve their business objectives, GA and its partners then help farmers, foresters and their organizations to translate their business plans into investment plans and projects that are large and profitable enough to attract national and international blended finance funders who may provide a mixture of funding sources, including guarantees, public sector and private foundation grants, loans, equity, ecosystem service payments and offtake agreements within public procurement and private markets.
One of Agroecology’s and Agroforestry’s key challenges is that projects are typically too small to be suitable for international investors. Therefore GA co-founder NOW Partners Foundation helps to assemble various projects into large enough joint funding facilities. If these projects include land-purchases, NOW attempts to structure investments in such a way that farm workers organized in cooperatives can economize enough money to eventually buy all or parts of the land, transforming farm-workers into land-owners.
With these and other international and local partners, GA is currently developing a new economic capacity building program. This Farmer ‘MBA’ is grounded in the pragmatic needs and contexts of family farmers and foresters in the Global South. Its interactive and pragmatic approach combines in-person learning supported by local facilitators and faculty with online content presented by international faculty offering best practices from around the world and across sectors to stimulate locally relevant innovation and application support.
This local – global programing exposes farmers and foresters to international innovation while also being supported to ground learning and implementation in their specific local contexts. Rather than having to access and navigate complex e-learning platforms that require much bandwidth and listen to long lectures or read long texts, farmers and foresters are invited to navigate across up to 150 online video clips that are displayed on easily accessible platforms such as Youtube and WhatsApp.
Series of 2-minute clips cover key economic topics such as ‘how to improve and maintain produce quality’, ‘how to add value’, ‘how to access public procurement markets’, ‘how to manage cash flows’, ‘how to access blended finance’. Local facilitators engage farmers and foresters in dialogs and support them to develop their locally and personally relevant solutions. GA has self-funded the initial program development and now seeks additional funding to complete and deliver the program.
