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Chocolate at Risk?: Why sustainable finance is crucial to ensuring a steady cocoa supply for the world’s chocolate industry
Smallholder cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire produce 40 percent of the world cocoa supply. Yet the vast majority still live in poverty due to declining productivity, and in the absence of long-term financing opportunities, many have been changing to other crops. Rainforest Alliance’s Helen Roy describes how socially-minded investors are mobilizing capital to help these farmers revive their land.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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In Uganda, Leveraging Public-Private Partnerships for Food Security
Failures in the Ugandan market deter farmers from adopting best practices for harvesting and handling, which in turn floods the market with low-quality crops for raw materials. Clinton Wong, a volunteer consultant for TechnoServe, helped lead an initiative to map the food sector in Uganda as part of the Solutions for African Food Enterprises (SAFE) program.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
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5 ways to deliver nutrition through cash crop standards
Nutrition security is an essential part of improving farmer livelihoods.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
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Rwanda: Why Farmers Are Loyal to Micro-Finance Institutions
Rwandans have hailed the role of micro-finance institutions just as Kigali is hosting a global financial inclusion summit starting today.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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A Supply Chain Overhaul To Boost Coffee Farmers’ Income 400%
This is about a social enterprise on a mission to reinvent the coffee supply chain, giving farmers a bigger and more equitable piece of the action.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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In Coffee, Avoiding ‘Great’ Being the Enemy of ‘Good’: The fair-trade model isn’t perfect, but it provides an essential foundation for improving livelihoods
The Fair Trade, Employment, and Poverty Reduction project recently released a widely discussed study that asserts fair-trade practices do not help the poorest agricultural workers. While enthused to see new research into the effectiveness of the fair-trade system, Sustainable Harvest’s Jorge Cuevas takes issue with its conclusions, particularly when it comes to coffee.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education
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Healthy Foods and New Jobs, Part 2: Infrastructure matters
On the way to introducing a food cart vendor business in Benin, West Africa, MamaCarts has encountered all sorts of problems with sanitation, incorporation and the government. But there’s a positive spin on these infrastructure gaps: Alternative solutions do exist and people circumnavigate these difficulties on a daily basis.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Health Care, Social Enterprise
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Social Lending for Smallholders: Opportunities to support social lenders in closing the smallholder agricultural finance gap
The global demand for food is increasing, but the smallholder farmers who could help meet that demand lack the funds to invest in productivity and connect to markets. And many of the businesses that aggregate smallholders lack access to credit. Social lenders are one solution, says Laura Goldman, in discussing the Initiative for Smallholder Finance’s new guide to investing in or funding the sector.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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