Why convene again? Anticipating Small Foundation’s 2025 partner gathering

In February 2024, Small Foundation convened our first ever gathering of partners and peers. The event was inspired by the success of other funders and launched with intentional objectives to foster learning and collaboration.

Our 2024 gathering, co-created with our partner content committee and Circle Generation, was a success from our perspective. We learned, deepened engagement, and delivered a meaningful event. But what did participants think?

What did participants value?

We received strong positive feedback on the value of the 2024 partner gathering. Post-event survey responses told us:

• Participants were likely to recommend the gathering to a colleague – survey respondents gave the gathering an ‘excellent’ net promoter score.
  
• Reported benefits included the range of participants, connections made, and learning opportunities.

’A huge thank you. It was so wonderful and I feel so energised, just knowing there are so many aligned peers who care deeply about the same things I do. It’s so difficult what we are trying to do and to know this makes me feel supported and motivated to keep going.’

– Survey respondent

• Participants reported advantages to the event being located on the African continent and adjacent to another ecosystem event:
  
  

We learned about the geographic reach of the gathering:

• Participants came from entities based mostly in East Africa, Europe or North America
  

• Participating entities mostly have impact in East, West and Southern Africa
  

Convening in 2025

Further to this feedback, responses to our annual stakeholder surveys, and comments and engagement at the event itself, we are excited to be hosting another gathering in 2025. We are grateful to last year’s participants for making this experiment a success to be repeated.

We are currently consulting our partners for input on the content and structure of the upcoming event. We have again engaged Circle Generation as facilitators, and through them are building a content committee to co-design the agenda.

We believe that in-person convenings build trust and form the basis for successful and sustained collaboration. We are conducting a second social network analysis to learn if there was increased connection, coordination or collaboration between 2024 gathering attendees over the year. We also hope to learn more about the ongoing impact of the gathering from our annual stakeholder survey.

Small Foundation will continue to be transparent around our learnings about gathering our partners. As we convene again in 2025, we look forward to rich discussions that will amplify our collective impact towards supporting vibrant and productive rural-SME ecosystems across sub-Saharan Africa.