Partnership and Collaboration

As one of our core values, we believe in the power of partnerships and actively collaborate with communities, local and international organizations, governments, and stakeholders to maximize our collective impact. Smart Community International (SCI) works and collaborates with partners drawn from two categories:

1. Strategic partners
These are partners who have a certain capacity and work within SCI’s core competences and focus areas (geographically and sector-wise). SCI focuses on building few and strong strategic partnerships in each programme country in order to focus and increase the impact when implementing projects.

In some cases SCI enters into a partnership with institutions, consultants and experts who have special expertise within the focus areas of SCI, if they can add professional value to the projects that SCI cannot provide for itself.

2. Smaller Civil Society based partners
All development projects are based on long term partnerships with well-known local partners. However, in some cases SCI chooses to partner with civil society organizations, who do not have the same amount of capacity as strategic partners, but because they have a unique platform as CSOs in remote geographical places where few – or no one else works, within SCI’s focus areas (geographically and sector-wise). In order to invest and build the capacity of these partners to achieve their objectives, the following criteria are considered when entering into a partnership:
(a) Geographical area and sector focus – is it in line with the vision, mission and core competences of SCI?
(b) SCI’s capacity to invest in and capacity build the partner based on the number of other smaller partners in the relevant country, the agreements made between them and (human and financial) resources available.