To make the partnerships more effective Aid, NGOs and civic society need to understand the different landscapes that businesses operate in and also understand the specifics of each industry, be that flowers or garments, and the drivers for change within these industries. The business community needs to learn from the other sectors, in particular around transformative change, community engagement, behaviour change and the benefits of MEL, and begin to recognise the deep connectivity between human rights (especially gender equality), ethical trade and the environment for their industry’s success or failure and to use these to prevent or mitigate any future shocks
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A challenge that is very hard to overcome is the eventual loss of momentum for action once a crisis is not as evident anymore or has been going on for a while. While support of our anti-COVID efforts was on a real high last year, it is hard to keep partners and their resources engaged today. The crisis has been going on for quite some time and there are so many places around the world that need donor support. Therefore, while our efforts were successful, future partnerships need to be aware of the likely short timeframe of collaboration. It is important to ensure that some degree of exchange also happens beyond the initial crisis collaboration.
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Completely hear you, and the annual review was completed before the announcement of reduced ODA budgets. I’m conscious this means we have less scope to pick up this recommendation going forward. However, the new team working on the responsible and inclusive business policy are formulating a new strategy to inform the UK Government’s Spending Review and we are keen to learn the lessons and reflect these in the future work of the department.
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Totally agree Emilie - how we get these two different responses to support each other is crucial. I feel that the Flowers project if given even another year or two would begin to show real benefits.
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These partnerships that have evolved need the fuel to go the final mile in building back stronger and resilient supply chains for the most vulnerable, especially women.
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Answer from Jahirul Azad – CARE Bangladesh: What Brand partners are thinking about the sustainability considering the short timeframe of the VSCF project and COVID-19 is still going on
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Q3. How can we partner more effectively to rebuild better and embed resilience to future shocks?
COVID-19 shaped and tested the course of development co-operation in 2020 and set the agenda for 2021 and beyond. The pandemic – or a pandemic – was forecast, but the world was not prepared. International debates on the future of development co-operation reiterate the pressing need to work together to beat the virus and emerge from the pandemic better prepared and equipped to tackle and mitigate new pandemics and other global threats. By placing renewed emphasis on strengthening resilience – the ability to withstand, absorb and be transformed positively by shocks – in communities, institutions, and economic, social and environmental systems, international development actors with business partners can play a critical capacity-building role.
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@Jahirul good question and we are using the learning from this project to ensure that we continue to implement the changes required.
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A3: It is important that we take time to learn from the experiences of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic as business partnerships and create the enabling environment to allow all partners to respond effectively in future, whilst building resilience in communities that are most at risk. There are three elements I would encourage for effective partnerships in the future:
Building Trust – Businesses, NGOs and government need to continue to build trust with vulnerable communities now, ensuring that each understand each other’s roles in ensuring community/farmer-centric approaches and putting in place the necessary partnerships to enable locally led responses that lead to greater resilience.
Communication – There has been a great increase in communication of key challenges between different business partners, and greater levels of empathy as to the challenges each are facing. There is also now a spotlight and mechanisms set up to quickly understand the situations of those most affected by the pandemic. On the Cadbury Farmer Resilience Fund we used lean data approaches to quickly gain insights from the farmers we are working with, triangulating our findings with our in-depth conversations with the leaders of cooperatives on a daily basis to deliver our interventions. This dialogue, both with vulnerable communities on the ground, and between business partners is critical in enabling rapid and effective responses in the future as well as free-up and pivot resources quickly and effectively. These communication flows and forums to discuss sustainability issues must continue into the future as it will allow effective responses in future times of crisis.
Focus on embedding resilience now - We must not take a foot off the pedal. A key learning across the board is that businesses now have a much clearer idea of where vulnerabilities exist in their supply chains, and resilience levels are perhaps not as strong as had been anticipated. The immediate impact of our responses through the Vulnerable Supply Chain Facility is the start of ensuring continued resilience but there is more to do. Business partnerships must turn their focus on ensuring resilience now to avert future disaster – and government has a key role to play as an accelerator of this resilience work – making seed funding available to create urgency, a focus on problem-solving and enable a platform for different business agendas to work together towards the same goal.
On the Cadbury Farmer Resilience Fund and as part of the wider Fairtrade – Mondelez International partnership we continue to work across these three core areas, asking ourselves difficult questions about what the most effective ways we can take tangible steps towards ensuring the cocoa communities we work with are resilient to shocks and building towards sustainable livelihoods for all. We are currently working on a roadmap as to how the cocoa sector can work together to do this, understanding the roles and responsibilities of all actors in the sector and welcome others to be part of the conversation. You can find our research into this space here:
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Resilience has gained prominence on the international agenda due to growing recognition of the interconnections among different types of risks, such as gender based violence and disasters such as this one, climate change, and specific risk factors such as urbanisation and ageing populations - the multidimensional impacts of this crisis call for enhanced commitment to build resilience in immediate responses and long-term recovery efforts. Organisations like CARE cannot do this on their own. They need committed, expert, and business partners willing to engage in meeting the wider SDG’s commitments in the future and we promise to do the same.
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Great question to finish on. Some points for consideration from us:
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FCDO is keen to ensure we learn from our programmatic history in business partnerships, both as part of rapid response to future shocks but also for rebuilding in a more sustainable way.
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Key to this is considering an ‘offer to business’ that allows for responsiveness and real partnership. Outside of sectoral and geographic approaches, there has been a need to have instruments that allow for flexible and responsive partnerships with business to respond to emerging (i.e. covid-19) and/or systemic issues (i.e. procurement in ready-made garment sectors). We have learnt from engaging with businesses that:
- Companies often struggle to squeeze into specific narrowly focused projects (gender, plastic) and are looking for partnerships that are more responsive and
- Companies are open to more than just the traditional Technical Assistance model and would be keen for debt, co-investment etc.
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We need to consider carefully an ambitious approach to business engagement- how we talk to, bring in and engage with business. There is real opportunity in making business engagement a more central and proactive part of how we operate. A proactive strategy is needed that seeks out business relationships to deliver both diplomatic and development objectives.
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To partner more effectively in the future, I believe the following points are important:
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We need to find ways to move mainstream private sector involvement that goes beyond philanthropy in the long term. Therefore, it makes sense to build the business case for them to make commercial returns so their involvement becomes sustainable.
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Community engagement is a MUST DO before initiation of interventions to ensure targeting and community support of any campaign.
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Lastly, I believe it is important to distinguish between different kinds of collaboration models and to decide on the most useful one to apply in the given context. There is no one size fits all approach when it comes to partnership and expectations should be managed early on in the mission formulation.
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A3. A combination of all the previous answers - perhaps a willingness to go beyond the usual suspects, a continuous commitment to equality, diversity and flexibility. Each member needs to lead by example, deliver their specialisation or agreed role, and all need to have a commitment to the overall aims of the programme. Collaboration needs to be built upon open and honest communication, trust, and the permission and space to question and think things through. Each organisation and their staff member(s) need to understand their role in the partnership and what each must do to make the partnership successful.
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Q-3: Response
- Platforms with long-term engagement of partners is helpful in storing the knowledge and replicating when required. For example, Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) where members have long term engagement regarding different aspects of their work.
- Consolidation and dissemination of learning can have broader effect
- More communication, collaboration, dialogue among all the potential actors will help having a lasting effect
- Enduring partnership to realize a joint vision is always important
- Not only service providing, rather system strengthening should be focused on. We need to be proactive; not reactive all the times.
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Effective partnerships should not only focus on response to shock scenarios but also to ensure that we are prepared for future crises. COVID-19 has exposed the fragility of many health care systems around the world. This has crippled many aspects of our lives beyond health which calls for partnerships to create long-lasting partnerships that help prepare for future crises. Partnerships should come up with emergency response strategies jointly designed by the private sector, charity sector and governments, review how internal systems like procurement, last-mile delivery and communications can work better across all parties. This enables better response in crises and limits loss of life and livelihoods.
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A3: On the Building Resilience in Flower Supply Chains Project, we are using the momentum created by the rapid response to create a roadmap for working together on long-term sustainability issues in flower supply chains. The project has held five retailer roundtables, which have focused on sharing perspectives of the impact of the pandemic across the supply chain spanning workers, farm managers, suppliers, retailers and consumers. We have discussed the crisis in the context of existing structural inequalities with the intention of exploring as a group what changes need to made in order to rebuild better to create a more resilient supply chain. Data collected by the project through our worker voice survey which gathered data from over 2,000 flower farm workers has helped us to understand better how workers in flower supply chains were impacted by the pandemic and where resilience needs to be built for long-term sustainability in the supply chain. This in turn has led to discussions around how to reduce worker vulnerability in the long-term, including looking at worker wages.
As a practical step towards rebuilding better, project partners have agreed to explore together the Dutch Covenant for Responsible Business Conduct in Floriculture to inform discussions of a UK equivalent, as well as looking at the best ways of moving forward as a group with the intention of building on the dialogue that has taken place in the roundtables and broaden out to a larger group of UK industry stakeholders. Finally, the project is also producing a policy paper with recommendations to the UK and Kenyan governments on how to rebuild better and embed resilience to future shocks, using learnings from the project.
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Surely agree that the time constraint was difficult. GoodWeave was piloting this work in a new country with new partners, and so in addition to limited amounts of time, your point on creating common understanding among different partners with various priorities is also important here. Thanks for sharing!
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A3:
A good starting point is with retailers / buyers / brands building relationships with their suppliers so that they are aware of the challenges they are facing and can quickly engage and mobilise the supplier to engage in the project.
Working with NGOs that have a very good understanding of the suppliers operating environment, their requirements and challenges is really important to ensure that the interventions are delivered with suppliers and workers needs in mind.
In addition, retailers / brands and buyers committing to longer term projects, to continue the good work undertaken during shorter-term donor funded projects and really maximise results. More longer-term partnerships would also mean that we are better equipped to quickly respond to any upcoming shocks – as the rest of the panel had mentioned, project start up is a lot smoother when there are existing partnerships in place.
As a complete aside - cash transfers have been so successful at the individual beneficiary / farmer level in development programmes, I would be so interested to see this type of intervention replicated at the business level, providing suppliers with a cash injection when they most need it – I believe this could provide interesting learning for businesses, workers and supply chains. The reason I say that is because I do believe that there is a risk that we may not always be reaching the most vulnerable suppliers and businesses (and therefore workers!) if we are only working with suppliers that can commit the (sometimes quite demanding) personnel time (both management and workers) to engaging in these type of programmes. If any of the panel know of any learning on this – I would be interested to hear it.
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Lastly from me on Q3 and just to reiterate what also has been said by others already, the key areas for thought are as follows:
Longer term view – any partnership needs to have a minimum of three to five years to develop and embed the key components, relationships, trust and initial impact to be effective to future shocks and build back stronger as I prefer rather than better. It is easier to qualify. This also means the willingness to stay the course and ring-fence the financial requirements.
Plan across the whole Disaster Management Cycle – building into the partnership plans the means and flexible approach to respond to sudden shocks makes it easier and more efficient/VfM from the outset.
Build existing relationships and linkages into the equation – ensure the linkages and relationships developed between private and public parties are mapped out and embedded for future shocks is critical. The response to the COVID pandemic across the VSCF would not have been as effective without these linkages. CARE has been aided by the relationships and trust built by the CARE Bangladesh Urban Health Team, lead by Dr Jewel and his team over the last five year and the trust others have in him, his team and CARE overall.
Bring the best to the table – an effective partnership needs to have best-in class experts who are committed to the project/response. This has been the case with M&S, GSK and CARE that has made the response so positive to the pandemic across the VSCF programme. We now see 95% of all workers are practicing safe hygiene behaviours; that feel safe; that are supported by their management; and have taken their knowledge and practice outside the factories to their homes, families and communities. The provision of expects that we have, especially within CARE to support vulnerable women and young girls, are critical to any future response to shocks, with the support from business partners who recognise and are wanting to partner with CARE.
And lastly, Development co-operation has to balance emergency response and continuity of existing programmes - Development co-operation agencies with their business partners need to continue to show impressive agility in responding to the health and humanitarian aspects of this and future pandemic through bilateral and multilateral channels and partnerships. Future partnerships that pivot to humanitarian assistance will need to adapt or expand to deliver cash, food, water, sanitation and other essential services and to protect populations, including from domestic and gender-based violence going forward. Priorities need to shift or be able to resume or expand to incorporate public health and education programmes, providing longer term income support, investment in information systems and technologies, and protecting jobs and livelihoods. Closing the digital connectivity gap has become even more crucial as a means of providing and accessing public services and assistance during the crisis during this present pandemic and in Bangladesh across these vulnerable supply chains. Digitalisation is a particular challenge in this context.
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