How Farmer Segmentation Can Strengthen Supply Chains and Better Support Smallholder Farmers
Around the world, there are 35 million smallholder farming households participating in global supply chains. Yet, the contributions of smallholder farmers to the global economy are deeply undervalued. Despite playing a critical role in our daily lives and in our economy, as many as 24 million of those households, more than 122 million people in […]
New Report: Women Champion Forest Conservation in Bale, Ethiopia
A new report outlines how Farm Africa and SOS Sahel Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains Eco-region REDD+ forest conservation programme in Oromia, Ethiopia has achieved impressive results in reducing deforestation, cutting greenhouse gas emissions and increasing household incomes and gender equality. Since 2012, Farm Africa has been working in partnership with the NGO SOS Sahel Ethiopia, with […]
Empowering action towards improved livelihoods
We often talk about system-level change to address root causes of poverty and the imbalance of risk. This requires us to unite in different and creative ways. The Living Income Community of Practice motivates actors across sectors to help close the income gap, so that smallholders can earn a decent standard of living as a […]
Faced with the COVID-19 Pandemic, Farmers in Ecuador Innovate a Whole New Food System
There was no way for small-scale farmers in Ecuador to anticipate the COVID-19 pandemic more than a year ago when they started diversifying the products they grew and mapping efficient paths to get them to hungry urban markets. But when the coronavirus hit the South American nation hard, these farmers found themselves well-prepared to keep […]
Four lessons for businesses wanting to build more equitable supply chains through sustainable sourcing
Approximately 78 percent of the world’s poor, or 800 million people , live in rural areas and rely on agriculture for a living. Most of those smallholder farmers are operating at extremely low levels of productivity and are excluded from formal markets. Meanwhile, there is a growing demand for locally-sourced food, particularly in growing urban hubs […]
Upcoming Online Event: Tackling Poverty in Global Value Chains
As part of Business Fights Poverty NYC Online 2020, Business Fights Poverty and Mars are convening a webinar and online peer discussion to explore the role of industry-led collaborative initiatives in addressing poverty in supply chains. The webinar will take place on Thursday, 24 September at 8.30 – 9.30am EDT / 1.30 – 2.30pm BST, followed by 30 minutes […]
Better Coffee, Better Prices: Improving Farmer Livelihoods through Quality Improvements
The hillsides surrounding Besheshe village in western Ethiopia are covered in coffee gardens and wild coffee trees growing under the forest canopy. Generations of farmers there have depended on this coffee to eke out a living. The varietals near Besheshe are unique, with the potential to produce the kind of flavors that discerning coffee drinkers […]
The Partnership Re-Imagining the Rice Value Chain in Nigeria
The Value Chain Development Program (VCDP) is a partnership between the Federal Government of Nigeria, IFAD and Olam. It works to connect smallholder farmers to markets, land, credit and other agricultural support to improve productivity, the quality of their produce and their linkage with agro-processors for the buying of this produce. In turn, this supports […]
How Tech Investments Can Help Smallholders in India
Inequality in income and availability of work between rural and urban areas are large contributors to a country’s overall economic inequality. In India, agriculture still employs more than half of the workforce, but wages are low and with rising education levels many young people no longer aspire to take over the family smallholder farm. Instead, […]
The Coffee Price Crisis: How to Support More Sustainable Livelihoods for Farmers
The world is starting to wake up to the difficulties facing coffee farmers. As global prices hover near historic lows, the media has shared stories of coffee growers struggling to keep their farms afloat or abandoning their crops to seek other sources of income. Governments, international organizations, private companies, and nonprofits have made public calls […]
How Root Capital and the IKEA Foundation are Building the Resilience of Smallholder Farmers in East Africa
Root Capital and the IKEA Foundation are announcing a new partnership, worth €4.8 million, to help 260,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda increase their income and adapt to climate change. The grant builds on the success of a previous partnership, through which Root Capital supported dozens of Kenyan agricultural businesses, helping them break the […]
System Leadership in Practice: Technoserve’s East Africa Coffee Initiative
Read enough blogs, and you might think the formula for increasing smallholder farmers’ incomes is well-known: training + access to (inputs x finance x markets). Simple, right? From 2008-2015, TechnoServe’s East Africa Coffee Initiative reached more than 250,000 farmers in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania, increasing their incomes by more than 25%. A new report […]
New Report: Enabling Smallholder Farmers to Improve Their Incomes
By David Norman, Challenge Director, Business Fights Poverty Many global companies buy significant amounts of the crops they need from smallholder farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. They may source either directly from smallholders or indirectly, through traders. Companies choose to work with smallholder farmers for many reasons. Smallholders are often the main producers […]
Empowering Smallholder Farmers to Improve their Incomes
By David Norman, Challenge Director, Business Fights Poverty Millions of smallholders live in poverty, unable to meet basic needs. Smallholder farmers need to improve their incomes and competitiveness if they are to achieve and sustain a decent standard of living, reinvest in their farms, and continue to supply a sustainable crop to multinational companies. The […]
Emerging Trends in Digital Delivery of Agri-finance
This is the first in a series of three blogs on the role of technology in the rural finance projects supported by The MasterCard Foundation Fund for Rural Prosperity (FRP). In this first blog, we explore the major trends in digital delivery that the Fund is seeing in its portfolio. In the second blog, we […]
SABMiller/ AB InBev’s Local Sourcing in Africa
SABMiller plc, which combined with AB InBev in October 2016, has been a pioneer in promoting local sourcing in Africa. Many of the company’s subsidiaries in Africa have created new brands and brewing processes which incorporate locally grown crops such as sorghum and cassava. This is based on a win-win-win model where: Local businesses can […]
These 5 Innovations Will Transform the Lives of Smallholder Farmers
This article is part of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2017. From artificial intelligence, to precision agriculture, to the internet of things, emerging technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way food is consumed, handled and produced. But which technologies could most powerfully transform the lives of smallholder farmers? These, after all, are the […]
Access to Finance, Gender Bias and Climate Change Resilience for Smallholders
Olam expands on lessons learned from 5 years of the Olam Livelihood Charter Despite extensive progress being made under its Livelihood Charter, global agri-business Olam predicts that smallholder productivity across Africa, Asia and South America will still be massively hindered by lack of access to finance, equality for women and climate change impacts, unless far […]
How Small Farmers Can End Poverty and Hunger
Private companies are discovering that small farms are big business at the same time as the development community is realizing that they are key to ending poverty and hunger. There are 500 million small farms in the world, and their potential is huge. Indeed, small farms are responsible for up to 80 per cent of […]
Bringing Smallholders into The Global Market
Investing in smallholders has the most immediate impact on poverty reduction and employment in Africa, but how can larger businesses bring smallholder development into their business models? Smallholder farmers produce the majority of Africa’s food, and the sector as a whole is responsible for the greatest number of jobs in the continent by far. At […]