Challenge
The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) working in collaboration with hundreds of partners across the developing world, is dedicated to developing technologies, innovative methods, and new knowledge that better enable farmers, mainly smallholders, to improve their crop production, incomes, and management of natural resources. CIAT, through its Nutritional Early Warning System (NEWS) initiative is pioneering new thinking around the issues of enhancing nutrition surveillance in Africa. CIAT engaged Strategic Insights Academy to support its team and the facilitation consultant firm in jointly executing a High Level Thought Leadership Breakfast on NEWS at the 2017 Alliance for Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) in Cote D’Ivoire, Abidjan on 7 September 2017. The AGRF is the premier convening on African agriculture, attracting global and African leaders, farmers and other diverse actors to chart the path for transforming Africa’s agriculture for shared prosperity. As a platform, it offers unrivalled visibility opportunities for thought leaders. CIAT’s aim of holding the breakfast event was to increase awareness of its thought leadership in agricultural technology sphere and to connect effectively with potential collaborators and funders.
Approach
We developed a comprehensive event management plan to guide all aspects of the high level breakfast. Our support included: providing overall strategic advice on design of the event; crafting the event brief for speakers and participants; generating the event’s participant list; handing communications with event’s speakers and delegates, including developing and distributing the invite and managing the RSVPs; handling overall event logistics onsite in Abidjan including branding; coordinating content capture on the event’s sessions; preparing the event report and managing the post-event communications with the session’s participants.
Our efforts led to a successful event attended by 100 agricultural and nutrition security actors and artificial intelligence experts
Impact
Our efforts led to the execution of a successful event that was attended by over 100 agricultural and nutrition security actors and artificial intelligence experts from development organizations, funding agencies, and international research bodies. We developed a news article; a synthesis of the event’s discussion and takeaways; and the overall event report. We also developed thank you notes for speakers and delegates capturing the event highlights and way forward.