Atul Mittal
Business development director
Impact partnerships are a specific type of multi-sector partnership designed to create clear and expressive impact towards a social and environmental goal. Over the years we have learnt that these partnerships work better when we set clear results and have transparent roles & responsibilities, and we build monitoring & learning mechanisms together. As a method of innovation, the central goal of an impact partnership is to scale current effective activity in a given area through the power of cross-sector collaboration, or to generate new ideas and solutions with measurable impact delivered across sectors.
Why do we choose scaling biogas programs with impact partnerships?
We chose scaling biogas plants with Impact partnerships for following reasons:
- Waste management at farmer level is an entrenched social problem that isn’t getting fixed easily. Social engineering is needed to fix the issue, and this is where impact organizations come in handy.
- The existing biogas solutions available in the market are not currently fulfilling their potential. Building trust in Sistema.bio’s proposition requires support from impact organizations.
- Implementing farm-level biogas installations requires disparate and conflicting efforts. Scaling up with impact partnerships allows us to tackle issues like availability of local talent, fund support for farmer adoption and community engagement platforms.
- Executing large biogas projects often comes with a high level of uncertainty, and many times an organization like Sistema.bio struggles to act alone due to lack of clarity of the problem or where to act, or low risk appetite and not wanting to invest in the wrong area.
How do impact partnerships scale at Sistema.bio?
At Sistema.bio we continuously debate on how to engage, onboard and roll out our biogas proposition through impact partnerships. Over a decade of experience has helped us understand that to tackle the most pressing problems the world is facing, such as climate change and food security, we need to harness the collective resources, skills and support from multiple sectors. Impact partnerships unlock a significant and untapped pool of resources for social good by bringing together the commitment, assets and expertise from different sectors to tackle tough challenges more effectively.
At Sistema.bio we have four types of impact partnerships where we engage with multiple stake holders together to execute large projects at scale:
- Big corporates & giver organizations: This involves working with huge resources, highly driven staff and often worldwide reach. Big firms can be well placed to come up with solutions, especially in the areas of climate change, carbon neutrality and organic farming, where there is both a strong motive for them to improve farmer productivity and wellbeing and the opportunity to focus on sustainability. We work with large organizations in the IT, Banking and Manufacturing sectors’ social arms to achieve our objectives.
- Central Governments: With convening power and authority to incentivise inclusiveness with funding, policy and regulation, for instance MNRE in India (Ministry of New & Renewable Energy Resources, New Delhi).
- Civil society: We work with the expertise and depth of knowledge on entrenched social issues and funding resources to support the partnership. These are known as Sistema.bio partner NGOs.
- Social innovators and entrepreneurs: With ideas, drive and expertise on the issues being addressed. Many times, a for-profit approach makes them walk on sustainable paths.
Although there is often a desire from cross-sector partners to work together, it is not always easy to determine how a collaboration might work in practice. At Sistema.bio India, through a structured process, we help impact partnerships define their key objectives and challenges, identify each other’s strengths and contributions, and determine the best approach to tackle the problem at hand.
Creating and orchestrating effective impact partnerships typically involves four key stages:
Sistema.bio’s belief in partnerships to tackle tough social challenges is longstanding, and one of the keystones of our work. (it’s one of our core values: we work hard because farmers work hard).
Through these projects we are delivering our modern biogas plants in a collaborative, high-intensity, structured but agile fashion. Each programme has an internal champion within our organization who garners support from other departments like TechOps, Production, and Product Development.
We are happy to discuss more about executing large-scale partnerships. Please feel free to contact me at [email protected] for more information
