Making Agribusiness Work

Who is this course designed for?

Making Agribusiness Work is for professionals aspiring to contribute to local economic development and food security. Whether you are an agribusiness coach, advisor, or agri-food professional iCRA designed this course for you. Are you ambitious and willing to invest 6-8 hours per week? Than this course is for you. This program will enable you to create market value and establish trustworthy business relationships. It will help you to play your part in the food system transformation in your country.

What’s included in this course?

When your course begins, you will be invited our online learning environment ‘Learningstone’. Each week you will explore a module online at your own pace. You will learn new concepts through short texts, audio content and videos. Exercises enable you practice what you learn and receive feedback from your trainers and peers.

Biweekly, we organise interactive online sessions on Tuesday afternoons. There our trainers will guide you to start applying new skills to your professional life. You will also join a Whatsapp group dedicated to your cohort and enlarge your network of like-minded professionals around the globe.

A face-to-face training in The Netherlands is included. Training days include classroom sessions, field visits and group assignments. For the 2026 edition of the course, the face-to-face part will take place from 15-22 April 2026.

The tuition fee covers your course materials alongside lunch and snacks on training days. Accommodation, travel, visa costs, other meals and additional costs you might face are not included.

Scholarships are occasionally available for select courses. Check out our FAQs to find out more!

The Program

Block 1: Becoming competitive through collaboration 

Explore the value of collaboration in Agribusiness Clusters. Learn to assess agribusiness partnerships. Develop skills to persuade agribusinesses to recognize their interdependence. Guide the process of creating shared solutions and pursuing joint opportunities.

Block 2: Building business relationships

Discover how to involve the right actors, build trust in business relationships, and develop competitive strategies for cluster formation. Learn how to secure stakeholder buy-in for long-term partnerships.

Block 3: Facilitating effective stakeholder communication

Facilitating multi-stakeholder communication and meetings is one of an agribusiness advisor’s core tasks. This is far from easy when a few dominate the discussion, others stay quiet and opinions differ. Learn to design meetings that create safe space where diverse perspectives are valued, people feel free to speak out, and meeting goals are successfully achieved within time.

Block 4: Essentials for building trust and creating commitment

Learn how to address common challenges getting stakeholders onboard and creating commitment. It is inevitable that conflicts surface in a partnership. You will learn facilitation techniques including listening skills, self-disclosure and conflict handling skills to nurture resilient, long-term relationships.

Block 5: Group facilitation and negotiation skills

Giving everyone a voice is essential to inclusive agribusiness. Arranging and facilitating effective meetings can be challenging especially when you face disagreements. You will learn to manage group dynamics and guide negotiations towards win-win solutions.

Block 6: Agribusiness (cluster) partnership in action 

During a field visit you will get the opportunity to see and explore how agribusiness partnerships work in practice. You will interact & exchange with actors from Ekoboerderij de Lingehof and Lekker Lupine, a collaborative network promoting production, marketing & consumption of Lupine. This will help you apply what you’ve learnt to your own example case and guide you in integrating your new skills into your work.