Partnerships and Collaboration - Summary of the Workshop

Introduced by:
Roula Kamhawi, President, Africa, India and Middle East, Mars Inc., UAE

Led by:
Gib Bulloch, Director, Accenture Development Partnerships
Tanja Giscard d’Estaing, The ValueWeb

Experts:
Geoff Smith, Global Director, Health Chelates for AkzoNobel, Singapore. Geoff also represents AkzoNobel in the Amsterdam Initiative against Malnutrition (AIM)
Andreas Bluethner, Global Coordinator - BASF Micronutrient Initiatives, BASF, Germany
Adeline Lescanne, Deputy General Manager, Nutriset, France  

The move to new partnerships, away from the “one issue, one country, one NGO, one business” paradigm, requires a systemic change. The emerging model will be more complex and more diverse, hence requiring stakeholders to connect in different ways. The workshop gave participants an opportunity to start to make these connections and brainstorm concrete ideas of partnerships.
 
In the first two sessions, the workshop started with a fast-paced interview of three leading experts, who gave some examples of innovative partnerships they were involved in, ranging from a purely B-to-B partnership to a complex multi-stakeholder coalition. The experts also shared their ideas of “dream partnerships” to fight malnutrition. Participants were then split into small sub groups to work on a futuristic scenario. They were invited to step into 2025, into a world where malnutrition were long forgotten, and they were asked to imagine how partnerships had made a difference since 2010. In the process, they brainstormed some key success factors for strong partnerships and listed obstacles that would have to be anticipated. To wrap up the workshop, they paired up to quickly generate seeds of real partnerships that they would be interested in taking forward.
 
In the third session, participants were given an opportunity to pitch their partnership ideas and attract other potential partners. Four groups were formed around these partnerships and together, participants developed a vision and a concrete strategy for their partnership.