Selecting the Right Partners: Strategies to Support Inclusive Business Scaling
This study was undertaken with the financial support of the Inclusive Business Action Network (IBAN). IBAN is a global multi-stakeholder network enabling and promoting inclusive business worldwide. It is implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
The focus of this report is to shed light on the opportunity for inclusive business leaders to leverage partnerships to overcome the challenges they face in seeking sustainability at scale. Our findings, based on interviews with both entrepreneurial and corporate-led enterprises engaging with smallholder farmers in Kenya and South Africa, offer important insights on how these enterprises can enhance their performance through building an effective partnership ecosystem. In particular, we focus on addressing the following two questions for IBs seeking to transition from pilot to scale:
The “who” – Which partners should enterprise leaders prioritize as most crucial to enabling sustainable, scalable inclusive business development?
The “how” – Once these inclusive business leaders have identified their priority partners, what are the strategies and processes they will need to use to develop and maintain these relationships to maximize their effectiveness?