While one could characterize most donor programs as partnerships between the donor and host country, it has become essential to look beyond this traditional dyad toward ways to leverage other funding sources. Generally speaking, the private sector is best suited to create economic growth. Functioning food systems are, of course, ultimately built and operated by business. Therefore, a key part of a donors' role in ensuring food security should be helping to create a friendly and stable investment climate. In the context of food security, donors need to bring in both the private sector and civil society to determine where investment can have the most catalytic effect. Once this is determined (for example, in Tanzania a study found that investments in food processing have a higher multiplier effect than those in any other sector), donors and businesses must come to an agreement about the right balance of resources and roles to make investments scalable and sustainable.
While partnerships with the private sector and coordination amongst donors are not new concepts, they have become increasingly important given today's political and economic realities. To be successful, donors need to find better ways to coordinate and leverage existing sources of funding at all levels. Country-led plans such as the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) and the Feed the Future Initiative represent a good first step toward this approach. Coordinating directly with a country on its own priorities, as in CAADP, and having a clear set of goals and mechanisms, as outlined in the Feed the Future Initiative, create a transparent platform for high-level donor dialogues. The United States and European Union have gone so far as to identify priority countries that will be the focus of increased efforts at coordination. However, while much of this work has begun at the highest levels, these are two programs where change will require a renewed focus on ground-level action and partnerships.
There are many instances where ground-level focus has yielded real development results. Much of the work left to be done lies in identifying, scaling, and duplicating the successes that have already been achieved while getting past those projects that have failed to achieve real results. It is all too apparent that some partnerships exist more on paper than in reality, and in a time of increased constraints, donors should not shy away from distinguishing success from failure and concentrating resources. Successful partnerships with host countries, civil society, and business need to be recognized and repeated; those that have not been successful need to be honestly acknowledged and left behind.
The German Marshall Fund is supporting a Transatlantic Experts Group to examine successful and failed food security partnerships in east Africa, with the goal of transmitting best practices and policy recommendations to transatlantic and African policymakers and other stakeholders in early 2012. The group will look beyond high-level commitments to partnerships in practice on the ground, and will work to provide an honest view of what works and what doesn't.
Even aggressive action to increase coordination and focus on successful partnership models will not relieve the current crisis in the Horn of Africa. The current situation calls for intensive and immediate humanitarian relief. However, in order to minimize the likelihood of future famines and food emergencies, much remains to be done in creating the robust, functioning food value chains that so many in the developed world take for granted.
