Investor dialogues reshape agricultural investment strategies

CASA’s agriculture investment summits offer an opportunity to deep dive into specific investment constraints and opportunities specific the partner country.

The goal is to attract additional agricultural investments. The approach is to support the national investment agencies to pilot more collaborative approaches to refreshing their policies and brokering deals and investors in agriculture. CASA works with partners to facilitate greater collaboration between government agencies, investment intermediaries, investors, and other in-country stakeholders.

CASA’s 6 step approachIdentification/selection process find the key people and institutions

1. The facilitation team works with knowledge partners and key members of the investor community to identify a representative group of investors, influencers and other stakeholders, but especially:

• Agricultural investors active in the country
• Agricultural investors active in the region, and interested in starting deal origination in country
• Banks and pension funds / insurance companies active in the country Not currently investing in agriculture

2. Identification/selection process and to understand the landscape

The facilitation team holds conversations with the investment authority to clarify their process of selecting investors. The team holds one-to-one meetings with selected investors to identify key challenges, bottlenecks and priority value chains.

3. Verify issues and establish priorities

The facilitation team meets with selected government bodies and the national investment agency to feedback the priority topics identified by the investor community. They work to clarify the roles and remits of the government bodies able to impact on the policies and regulations to address the bottleneck and align to broader government strategies. These often include sustainable agriculture intensification, gender and other considerations

4. Agree participation, timing, location, and format of the meeting

The facilitation team works with local partners to agree the format of the meeting. This may be on-line, face-to-face, or a blended option.

The aim is to keep format simple and to create the maximum time for discussion and integration new idea and removal of bottlenecks.

5. Champions, for each priority topic

For each breakout group a facilitator, scribe and champion are allocated ahead of time. The champion should be part of the investor community, but someone willing to represent the views of the group – not just soapbox their own ideas.

The champions explain the calls for action to address some of the underlying issues coming out of their group discussion.

6. Follow up work in country

Follow up work in country should lead to the announcement of a action plan with a clearly identified timeline for action.

CASA collates the discussion from the event and produces a 4×4 and video digest of the discussion which it shares widely.