Learning through partnership: External review of ALAN

In the four years since the African Leadership Academy launched its AL for Agribusiness Network (ALAN), it has become a vibrant and evolving space for young leaders in the African agriculture sector to gather and collaborate.

ALAN has grown to more than 1,000 members working across agriculture including young leaders, industry leaders, and organisations. The network fosters connection, enables internship opportunities, and facilitates collaborations and initiatives for positive impact in local communities.

In January 2024, Small Foundation enlisted an independent evaluator to assess ALAN’s progress by analysing its network data and interviewing network participants. The aim was to surface key learnings that could improve Small Foundation’s network practice and provide feedback to ALAN.

During interviews, young leaders engaged in ALAN expressed a passion for agriculture, enthusiasm about impacting the sector, and appreciation for opportunities presented through the network. The evaluation also identified opportunities for ALAN to refine the approach to its next phase of development. Highlights include:

• The network must balance deep trust and connection with scale. Impact networks centre on trust-based relationships, which cannot be scaled effectively to thousands of people. ALAN is aiming for the right combination of programme reach (to accelerate learning and information-sharing) and relationship depth (to enable active collaboration).
• All member groups must value their respective roles. The network has seen lower engagement from employer members than from young leaders. This highlights the importance of clearly articulating the different value propositions of network participation for diverse stakeholder groups.
• Sufficient coordination capacity is essential. ALAN’s dedicated and skilled coordination team must respond to needs, weave connections, and develop relationships with and among over 1,000 diverse and geographically dispersed members. This is challenging, and requires sufficient resourcing.

For Small Foundation, we learned that core network support is highly valued, and our active engagement with network members and the coordination team is important. Feedback from ALAN also indicated that available tools for improving and measuring network practice are of value, including our Network IMM toolkit. Small Foundation will continue to develop and offer tools and resources to support network design, development, and evaluation.

“It was such a joy to have an outside set of eyes, brains and voices dig into the details of our work and give us your insights. It has provided us great food for thought.”

– Kate Morris, Director of Institutional Learning, African Leadership Academy

Small Foundation was recently delighted to announce a new phase of partnership with ALAN. We are grateful to ALAN’s leadership, staff, and participants for their ongoing commitment to transforming agribusiness in Africa.