Elizka didn’t start as a global policy actor. We started as local conveners, and we grew by listening to the land and the people we serve. Our history is a series of lessons learned on the ground.
2011–2012: The Foundation of Convening: We started with a simple hunch: if you bring the right people into the same room, you can solve complex problems. We didn’t have a massive office or a global budget. We had a commitment to bridging the gap between academic research and rural reality. We kicked things off with a multi-year collaboration with JIRCAS (Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences) and hosted the first Africa Summit at KNUST in 2012. That taught us the logistical rigor needed to pull off high-level summits. We learned how to handle protocol, how to manage dissent, and how to drive a room toward a consensus.
2013–2018: The Reality of the Field: By 2013, the conference rooms didn’t feel like enough. We moved from the seminar hall to the river basin. We focused on the hard, intersecting problems: agriculture, health, and environment. This was our “boots on the ground” phase. We worked directly with smallholder farmers and Traditional Councils, and we witnessed the brutal reality of illegal mining (galamsey). We saw the siltation, we saw the mercury, and we saw what it did to maternal health in our clinics.
This phase changed us. We realized that research is useless without community trust. We solidified our governance model here—prioritizing the “social license to operate” provided by the Traditional Councils. We stopped being just “conveners” and became “implementers.”
2018–Present: The “Diplomatic Sherpa” Phase Once we had the field credibility, we realized local work requires global backing. If we want to solve the problems in the Pra River Basin, we need the global policy community to understand the context.
Since 2018, we’ve pivoted. We now act as a diplomatic sherpa for our partners. We manage side events at the UN High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) in New York, engage with UN Human Rights events in Geneva, and facilitate the heavy lifting required for the Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development (ARFSD). Today, we sit at the center of this ecosystem: we are on the ground in the Ashanti region managing solar infrastructure and aquaculture hubs, and we are in the policy rooms in Addis Ababa and Geneva ensuring those local realities drive global policy.