In the past year, five new organisations and companies have applied to become members of the Agri-Profocus partnership. Let us present them to you here!

Heineken International
The international brewing company Heineken applied for APF membership after having been part of the local sourcing event that we organised in April, where in collaboration with APF they supplied a business case about Rwanda maize (see here). Their primary goal in joining is to obtain more local sourcing of raw materials, which in the future should amount up to 60% of its total buying. The joining of Heineken will mean a much broader basis of support for all our activities.

MDF
Management for Development Foundation (MDF) is a training and consulting agency for development practitioners worldwide, with a mission to support and facilitate improvement of management practices within organisations active in development co-operation. MDF would like to contribute their knowledge, network and management experience to the Agri-Profocus partnership. In return, it expects to be more informed about experiences, ideas, questions, results of other network actors, also the private actors and other new agencies looking for answering the questions about sustainable development. More information can be found on www.mdf.nl.

Icra
To support leadership and develop critical mass in facilitating knowledge-based rural and agricultural innovation, the International Centre for development-oriented Research in Agriculture (ICRA) provides training to professionals of education, research and development organisations, and strengthens the competency of inter-organisational and multidisciplinary teams to put their knowledge to work for innovation.
ICRA expects to profit from collaboration with AgriProFocus members, through knowledge sharing and by jointly implementing capacity strengthening programmes/ training involving producer organisations directly/ indirectly. More information can be found on www.icra-edu.org.

IFDC
The International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) has as its objective to increase agricultural productivity and to reduce poverty of smallholder farmers through improved access to inputs and markets. It directly works with producer organisations in strengthening their capacities in best agricultural practices. Before becoming an official member, IFDC was an affiliate organisation of APF as active coalition partner in the Rwanda Hub and worked with many of its members over the last 5 years. Unlike others, the organisation is not based in the Netherlands. More information can be found on www.ifdc.org.

The Hunger Project
The Hunger Project works towards the end of chronic hunger and poverty through mobilisation and empowerment of rural (farming) communities, strengthening women’s leadership and working with local government. THP has programme offices in 8 programme countries. In these countries, THP implements a community mobilisation strategy in which rural communities are organised in clusters of villages, called ‘epicenter’. In these epicenters, farmers are organised as producers. APF will open avenues for THP country programmes in Benin and Uganda to be linked to complementary partners to help achieve common goals. The collaboration with APF will help THPs around the world to be connected to different experiences and knowledge that can be fed in both ways. More information can be found on http://www.thehungerproject.nl/.