3 tips for agricultural development leaders from Sir Gordon Conway

To tackle hunger in Africa, leaders need to learn how to better deliver their messages to stakeholders and the general public. They must also shed some institutional ego to create more effective partnerships in the field, while at the same time rethinking the role of gender in rural development. Those were the key messages imparted to the top brass of the agricultural development community by Sir Gordon Conway, a leading figure in that world for about half a century, during an exclusive interview with Devex in Paris. At a point in his life when many people might prefer to tend to their backyard gardens, Conway has embarked on a new intercontinental mission. For years he maintained his status as a top agricultural development scholar while helping to run high-profile organizations, including stints as president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Royal Geographical Society. “These days I’m no longer an administrator. I’m no longer a researcher, though I’ve been all those things in my life,” he told an audience in Paris at the “Closing the Gender Gap in Farming Under Climate Change” conference sponsored by a coalition of groups spearheaded by CGIAR, an international consortium of agricultural research organizations. “I’m much more an advocate, because that’s what the Gates Foundation pays me to do.” The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation backs Agriculture for Impact, which Conway runs from the Imperial College London, where he remains a professor of international development. Like many organizations, A4I produces reports about pressing issues, but what sets it apart is its advocacy work. “We have meetings with senior policymakers,” he said. “We try to help them think about agriculture for the future.” Before he left Paris to tend to his 1 acre garden, Conway offered a few tips for agricultural development leaders. 1. Become a great articulator and get the message across. “Being a good leader is really about communications,” Conway noted. “It’s partly about setting an example. It’s partly about being tough. It’s partly about providing strong leadership. But in essence it’s about communications — being able to communicate to your staff at different levels, to all of the stakeholders, whether they are powerful or ‘mispowerful,’ and to the public in general.” He cited Mary Robinson as a model. “She’s a great articulator — she’s a great leader,” he said of the former Irish president who now runs her own foundation. “She’s a great articulator of the concept of climate justice.” 2. Get past ‘ownership’ and create partnerships that better leverage everyone’s contribution. Instead of jealously guarding independent fiefdoms, donors and development organizations need to work more closely together in ways that take better advantage of their respective strengths. “I think it’s very important to get away from small projects, which tend to be ‘owned’ by some donor or some [nongovernmental organization] or whatever,” Conway said. “We’ve got to talk about going to scale much more. We need donors to stop, as it were, carving up a country, saying, ‘You go work in the north and we’ll work in the south,’ and things of that nature. It would be much better if the donors worked more closely together. Perhaps one donor would say, ‘We’ll put some money into warehouses if you’d like to put some into food processing. Or maybe you could provide some guarantees for local banks.’” He sounded optimistic about potential moves in this direction in some parts of the world. “Many of them are going to be in growth corridors,” he said. “I’ve just been in Mozambique. I was looking at the Beira Growth Corridor. But there are a number of others.” 3. Given the key role of women in farming, the topic of gender in agricultural development must be addressed in a more sophisticated way. Most research and programs addressing gender tend to follow what Conway called a “bipolar agenda” — simply splitting people into one of two categories: male or female. But everyone has multiple identities — they can be poor or wealthy, grandparents, children, disabled, “or of a certain ethnicity, class or caste” — and these need to be factored into the equation. “All of those multiple identities are important,” he stressed. “Thinking about these multiple identities will be extremely important for progress in agricultural production, and, most importantly, for livelihoods. We have to keep remembering that farm households don’t just farm. They have other sources of income. Virtually everywhere they have other sources of income. Creating sustainable livelihoods is the big challenge.” Check out more insights and analysis for global development leaders like you, and sign up as an Executive Member to receive the information you need for your organization to thrive.