SNV-KIT partnership for SMART solutions in Agriculture

News

SNV Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV) and the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) formally announce their new partnership to offer smart solutions in agricultural development. Smart solutions are based on practical, global evidence that responds to local opportunities.

Gender inclusion

With International Women’s Day being marked in just a few days, SNV and KIT proudly announce their new partnership for inclusive, smart solutions in agricultural development. Both organisations widely recognise the importance of gender inclusion and parity, knowing that agricultural development can only be half as successful when only half of the population is effectively and equitably engaged.

At its core, this new partnership embraces this year’s IWD theme “Equality for women is progress for all”. In order to equitably distribute the benefits of economic growth to the full range of actors involved in agriculture, particularly women, a more inclusive development approach is
needed.

Concrete solutions

Companies need concrete solutions for inclusive business. Civil society organizations, such as NGOs and farmer organisations, need approaches and skills that effectively include large numbers of smallholder farmers in economic change. Governments need to provide access to quality agricultural services to assist smallholder producers.

To assure broad-based agricultural development, the brokering of collaboration between private, public and civil society is needed. The latter is a role in which both SNV and KIT have gained substantial experience.

“We believe that with this cooperation we can really make a difference in the current debate around inclusive development and agriculture. As SNV, we have a wealth of practical experience and knowledge on the ground. We can benefit from the extensive experience of KIT with knowledge development on gender, value chains, food and nutrition. We need them to transform our practical experience into smart solutions that can turn to scale. The more people use these insights and experiences, the more people will benefit in terms of better access to affordable and healthy food that is produced in a sustainable way” – Allert van den Ham, CEO of SNV

“SNV represents a wealth of knowledge with sustainable, inclusive development in the local context. By joining forces we elevate our knowledge and experience. This will lead to a better access to a broad range of services for our local partners” –Bart de Steenhuijsen-Piters, Head of KIT Sustainable Economic Development & Gender

Gender & food and nutrient security

In 2014-2015, the coalition will focus on two core themes: gender & food and nutrient security. SNV and KIT will work together to co-create and apply more scalable approaches for achieving inclusive value chain development that recognises different types of contributions and benefits all of the participants in the chain, in particular women. Furthermore, SNV and KIT will jointly focus their investments and efforts on ensuring people have access to affordable and healthy food, which takes into account the fact that increasing food production in a sustainable way is part of the solution.

Impact at scale

While the need to include women smallholders is widely admitted, few smart, scalable solutions have been put forward for use toolbox of possible development solutions. As such, the SNV-KIT partnership will articulate and initiate smart solutions for impact at scale. The objective is to combine existing theory and practical know-how with new insights from the field. This will take the form of knowledge kits (or solutions), each consisting of a background paper, tools and approaches and user guidelines on:

  • Gender and value chains;
  • Market based input supplies;
  • Sustainable productivity;
  • Gender and household nutrition security; and
  •  Food security and social impact.