31st January 2014 Brasilia, Brazil
Catalysing Partnerships – Guest blog by Mariana Almeida
The staff of the UK Department for International Development in Brasil went through a complete change in less than a year. The team has now a new face and even though each member has his/her own personality and experience, we all share the common goal of working with cooperation and international development in search of a better world.
We are only five people (me, Indranil, Darren, Max and Iasmin), but the will to make a difference with our work goes beyond the walls of the British Embassy in Brasilia and the UK borders.
Our partnership with Brasil consists of eradicating global poverty and promoting sustainable development. We have two major programmes and several projects within them: the Africa-Brasil Partnership on Smart Agriculture for Climate Change and Food Security (CLimAA) and the Development Effectiveness.
As we familiarised with the work, we realised that the moment to bring together our partners to exchange information about their activities (not only the ones supported by DFID) has come. That was how our 1st DFID Partners Meeting was born, allowing us to have more knowledge on the people and institutions we work with, to reflect about the outcomes and challenges we faced during the implementation of the project along with DFID. We took advantage of the opportunity to answer some queries on finance and programme management, as well as on monitoring and evaluation methods.
We did a showcase for those institutions and we invited some ambassadors from African countries where some activities supported by DFID are implemented. We also received our counterparts from the Japanese, German and European Union Embassies.
The event was a huge success and we hope to reap its fruits by keeping daily contact and strengthening those relations and partnerships. We were pleased to see the way our partners interacted and identified areas of common interest, planning future initiatives together. This “catalytic effect” was expected by our team and it is very important for the success of our work and our partner’s work because, like Hillary Clinton said, “alone we go faster, but together we go further”. For us, it was two really fruitful days that we are sure made all the difference in our work.