Partnerships & special projects

CIP has a rich and successful history of creating, coordinating, and working in partnerships. Partners and stakeholders span a range of groups and individuals, including formal partnership programs, advanced National Agricultural Research (NAR) institutions, and small-holder associations.

CIP’s close collaboration in these rich and varied partnerships helps ensure that we are effectively meeting the needs of our stakeholders, expanding the reach of our research, and delivering concrete benefits for end users.

As traditional research and development networks expand to include non-governmental organizations, producers groups, the private sector, policy-decision makers, and local communities, partnerships have become a central feature of international agricultural research-for-development organizations.

CIP’s partnerships and partnership strategies have evolved. As our partner countries develop greater institutional capacity, the form of our partnership changes; for example, in the emerging BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) economies, our partners are now advanced research institutions.

Partnership continues to be a research priority for CIP social scientists, who are experimenting with and publishing on new forms of partnerships for pro-poor innovation in market chains.

Projects

• Sweetpotato for Profit and Health Initiative (SPHI) aims to enhance the lives of 10 million African families in 10 years
• Sweetpotato Action for Security and Health in Africa (SASHA), launched in 2009, is a five-year initiative designed to exploit the full potential of sweetpotato in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Papa Andina, CIP’s regional innovation for development initiative, fosters pro-poor innovation in market chains, improving access to markets for small potato producers across three Andean countries: Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador.
• ALTAGRO, a CIP project in one of the poorest regions in the world between Peru and Boliva, represents a model for rural development based on a comprehensive view of sustainable agriculture that encompasses the economic, biophysical, socio-cultural, and environmental aspects of market-oriented development.
• UPWARD (Users’ Perspectives with Agricultural Research and Development) is an Asian network of scientists and development specialists linking users and R&D professionals together for more effective agricultural innovation
• The Red Latinpapa network of breeders from ten Latin American countries and Spain works to improve potato crop breeding and technological innovation
• Global Initiative on Late Blight is a worldwide partnership established to communicate key findings and explore new strategies to stem LB disease.
• After 18 years of hosting CONDESAN (Consortium for the Sustainable Development of the Andean Ecoregion), CIP helped this CGIAR program become an independent NGO

Related

A groundbreaking CIP study published in 2009 revealed important drivers that influence the functioning and effectiveness of partnerships, and identified the common factors shared by successful partnerships.