Lessons from Coalition Work in East Africa: An Interview with CSFEP’s East Africa Program Manager Bongiwe Shongwe

Coalition work is not about getting everyone to agree. It is about creating enough trust, clarity, and shared ownership for different actors to act together even when their incentives, timelines, and market pressures differ.

For Bongiwe Shongwe, facilitating the Biobased Construction East Africa Coalition has meant learning this lesson in real time. Bongiwe currently serves as the East Africa Program Manager at the Climate Smart Forest Economy Program (CSFEP). The Coalition  brings together partners across forestry, timber, construction, design, and policy to explore how to build a regenerative biobased construction economy in East Africa.

With the Coalition turning a year-and-a-half at the end of Q2, 2026, we spoke with Bongiwe to hear about what she’s learning along the way. Read on to hear her five key lessons about effectively facilitating a coalition. 

Building trust takes a range of approaches 

“We need to build trust for the Coalition to work,” Bongiwe says, “and it takes time to figure out how to build this trust–with each partner individually, and within the group. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach.”

Some partners like regular one-on-one check-ins to exchange ideas and emerging insights from the sector. Others prefer big-picture updates on key decisions, roles, and next steps to determine where they can be involved. Some, she says, need to see that the Coalition is not only listening to the most visible or best-resourced organisations, providing a very helpful and needed sense-making mechanism for the Coalition.

To build trust, it has been critical to pay attention to the specific things each partner needs while also building equitable processes, says Bongiwe. She explains that if partners feel overlooked, or that processes or decisions feel inconsistent, the Coalition’s foundation weakens. “Trust-building cannot sit outside the work.” she says, it is part of the work itself.” 

Ownership cannot be added at the end

Another important lesson for Bongiwe is that ownership grows when partners help shape the work from the beginning. In her view, it is not enough for members to attend meetings designed by others or contribute to activities connected to an agenda they did not help create. For the Coalition to last, partners need to see themselves as co-creators, helping define priorities, test ideas, and speak about the work as something the Coalition owns together, rather than as a CSFEP-led project.

“It’s important to build ownership from the get-go,” she says. “Ownership of the idea, concept, and the Coalition. You want people to self-identify as part of the Coalition and own it as theirs as opposed to seeing it as a CSFEP project.”

For Bongiwe, one sign that ownership is growing is when members increasingly describe the Coalition’s work as something they own together, rather than as a CSFEP-led project. In practice, she says, that means partners are not only attending meetings or giving feedback; they are helping shape priorities, move specific actions forward, and speak about the work as belonging to the Coalition. She also sees progress when trusted members begin to take small leadership roles — for example, connecting other partners, helping test an idea, or voluntarily bringing their knowledge of the wider value chain into the work. 

Focus and Timing are harder than they sound

Bongiwe also spoke about the challenge of deciding on the scope of  the Coalition’s focus. She described one particular moment early on when members questioned whether the Coalition’s priorities were too broad.

For her, the question is difficult because both extremes carry risk. If priorities are too broad, the work can become hard to act on. If they are too narrow, the Coalition may miss some of the systemic barriers it was created to address.

Timing of action brings a similar challenge. Bongiwe explained that engaging partners too early, before there is clear work to shape, can make it harder to sustain momentum. But engaging them too late can leave people feeling that decisions have already been made.

That balance has shaped how she understands CSFEP’s role as an ecosystem enabler: not controlling the process, but reducing friction by connecting the right people, filtering opportunities, and helping partners see where they can add value.

Tension can be useful information

Bongiwe is clear that coalition spaces are not free from tension. For example, partners may share a commitment to advance regenerative forests and better construction systems while also navigating different commercial pressures that require immediate financial returns. They may collaborate in one area and compete in another.

Rather than seeing this as a failure, Bongiwe sees it as something the Coalition has to understand carefully. These tensions can reveal whether an activity is solving a problem that matters to the wider system, or whether it mainly benefits one actor.

She connects this to a question partners often carry into Coalition spaces: “What is in it for me?” For Bongiwe, that question is not something to dismiss. It is a useful signal. If partners cannot see the value of participating, they will struggle to stay engaged. The work is to make shared value visible while recognising that each member brings different needs and pressures.

Confidence grows through doing

For Bongiwe, some of the clearest learning has come when the Coalition has moved from conversation into practical testing in small action groups. In those spaces, partners have not only discussed what might help timber uptake; they have started to test what builders, regulators, manufacturers, and clients actually need in order to use timber with confidence.

Bongiwe raises the Coalition’s work on timber specifications as one example. Through this action group, partners looked at how to make timber components that are readily available and cost competitive in the local market, such as interior wall partitions and flooring systems, easier for local building officials in Kenya to approve. Through practical, on-the-ground work, Coalition members explored how both manufacturers and officials could streamline the approval process for these components. 

She sees a similar lesson in the Coalition’s study of Melia volkensii, an indigenous  hardwood that grows in arid areas. Coalition members are exploring its potential structural use in construction. They began by assessing Melia’s mechanical properties, and the results are promising. Bongiwe explains that the study raised a more useful question than simply whether it would be possible to build with Melia or any other locally-grown tree species:  what would people need in order to use it with confidence? It pointed to practical barriers across the value chain. Farmers need to understand how better tree management could open higher-value markets. Researchers and manufacturers need evidence that the material can perform well in construction. Builders, regulators, and clients need to trust its strength, durability, and appearance.

“Sometimes the best learning comes from doing,” Bongiwe says. “Slow down your pace, trust the process, and enjoy the incremental wins.” While this lesson is hard to put into practice, it is a necessary component of learning-by-doing.

For Bongiwe, these examples show why practical coalition work matters. They make the barriers more visible, and they bring people with a shared vision into the same learning process — growers, researchers, processors, designers, regulators, and market actors. Not because CSFEP has all the answers, but because the answers need to be worked out together.

A year and a half in, she’s still learning, still building

Bongiwe does not present these reflections as finished answers as she continues to learn from the Coalition. Eighteen months into the Coalition’s work, there have been a lot of lessons and still more to come.

What comes through most clearly from the conversation with Bongiwe is that coalition work is slow, relational, and practical. It depends on trust, and each partner needs to build trust differently. It needs ownership, and ownership takes time to build. It has to hold tension,  and works to overcome the constant temptation to smooth it over to outwardly convey harmony. It needs action, and that action has to stay connected to a shared purpose.