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Strategy

Our strategy is not a blueprint, but primarily aims at creating enabling conditions for change to take place within the food and agriculture system.

We therefore …

  • Identify and mentor individuals and groups with similar values and practices, and who are committed to take dynamic leadership. We facilitate leadership potential among farmers, seed champions, community and CSO leaders, by exposing them to training, exchanges, and also inspiring learning experiences in other contexts.
  • Facilitate people-centred learning and sharing spaces for communities, farmers, women and youth, where they can network, forge relationships and build joint actions. We facilitate training and exchanges, and create spaces where farmers and other community groups can dialogue, deepen their understanding and produce new knowledge and develop common positions for action.
  • Support and enable organisations, networks and initiatives to act strategically and collaboratively, to continue learning and to be responsive to what is asked from them to lead to change in the region. Community-based organisations in Africa have historically faced many challenges in accessing resources for action and this skews power relationships and their ability to respond at critical moments.
  • Initiate the democratising of knowledge and knowledge institutions through participatory research with farmers and the nurturing of radical scholars aimed at challenging the discourse. Research, by farmers, community members, students and academics all form part of our strategy to create a body of knowledge that is both critical and supportive and which can be translated into accessible materials in different forms of media, to be used by a range of people, from farmers to policy-makers.
  • Engage decision-makers with new knowledge and lobby for change. One focus is on working with civil society and farmer networks in engaging decision-makers on all levels and challenging them with evidence-based positions where necessary.
  • Mobilise resources and making decisions about their use to support SKI and partner organisations’ actions in a strategic, participatory and responsive manner.