Building Equitable Partnerships: Moving from Rhetoric to Action

By Eunice R. Agbenyadzi and Anita Awuku Asare

 Partnerships are a unique feature of humanitarian and development work. Organizations build partnerships to optimize complementarity in achieving goals that they may not be able to achieve alone.

There is never a dispute about the importance of partnerships for achieving development outcomes; The debate is about what kind of partnerships is needed to create the societies that we want.

In the discourse on shifting power, it is believed that equitable partnerships foster local ownership, enhance mutual accountability, and lead to sustainability.

From right: Eunice R. Agbenyadzi, Head of Programmes, STAR-Ghana Foundation, Abraham Owusu Antwi, Projects Manager, Care International, and Eugenia Ayishetu Ayagiba, Women's Rights and Campaign Manager, ActionAid Ghana

In contribution to practice and peer learning, STAR-Ghana Foundation has introduced a learning café, dubbed ‘Conversations with Development Actors’ to harvest insights from individuals and organizations involved in charting new pathways for promoting community development.

For this series, the topic was Building Equitable Partnerships for Results: Working with Grassroots Organizations. We chose to spotlight partnerships with grassroot organizations for several reasons. Grassroots organizations directly work on the ground, thus earning them trust of their communities.

They are most likely to understand best solutions to challenges faced by their communities and are well-placed for frontline actions in emergencies. While some are organized, many remain informal, which can be both a strength and a gap.

Comparatively, they are also the most underfunded. For some funders, working with grassroot organizations presents too many risks for them. Yet, there are funders navigating this challenge and building meaningfu
l collaboration with grassroot actors and have experiences we can learn from.

We were joined by three organizations - Plan International, Care International and ActionAid Ghana - to discuss the topic.

Some participants during the learning event 

In this piece, we share highlights and insights from the conversation.

What does equal partnership mean to your organization?
To the panelists, it means engaging on equal terms, leveraging community resources, seeing things from the perspectives of communities and finally, recognizing and honoring local partners and communities’ contribution to development.

“Equal partnership means mutually agreed partnership on equal terms, from project ideation to implementation”, says Sarah Edris Asiedu, the Local Fundraising and Partnership Specialist of Plan International. This means ‘we see each other as contributing and agreeing to how we work together on an initiative”.

“Equal partnership could also mean leveraging on the available resources that communities may have for the desired change, Abraham Owusu Antwi, Project Manager of Care International adds.

“We see our organization as part of the community, thus we work hand-in-hand to challenge the system of injustice, as the communities may perceive it to be”, says, Eugenia Ayagiba, the Women’s Rights and Campaign Manager of ActionAid Ghana.

Eunice Agbenyadzi of STAR-Ghana Foundation adds, “equal partnership is a recognition on the part of parties that it takes people’s knowledge, interest, ability and money to bring about change, thus it appreciates the value that partners bring to co-creating and implementing ideas for change”’.