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Case Study : ‘Digging in’ or ‘building out’ to benefit farmers and buyers in outgrower schemes?
What can we learn from growing tobacco? Although TechnoServe does not work with the crop, nor do we intend to, it turns out there’s a lot we can glean from the successes of tobacco outgrower schemes.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Outgrower Schemes: A pathway to sustainable agriculture
Outgrower schemes, which link networks of unorganized smallholder farmers with domestic and international buyers, have demonstrated win-win potential – but don’t always live up to it. TechnoServe, in Part 1 of a two-part series, details its investigation into the features of effective and sustainable outgrower models.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education
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What’s Holding Agricultural Finance Back?: The MIX describes what’s needed to help this crucial sector grow
One of the most effective ways to reduce poverty is to increase agricultural productivity. But for many farmers, access to yield-increasing technologies and inputs requires access to financial products specially tailored to their needs, which are scarce in rural areas. Xavier Martin Palomas of the MIX discusses this challenge and how financial service providers and policymakers can address it.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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NexThought Monday – Between the CEO and the BoP: Root Capital report focuses on the often overlooked role of women as “middle managers”
Root Capital CEO Willy Foote says the impact investment firm realized that most approaches to women’s economic empowerment have focused on the opposite ends of the economic spectrum: business leaders and entrepreneurs on one side, and women workers at the BoP on the other. But what about women who are not CEOs or entrepreneurs but who hold positions critical to the success of the enterprise?
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Nexthought Monday – Fertilizer as Both Friend AND Foe: How to use them more responsibly, effectively and for farmers – profitably
More than 100 million tons of fertilizers are applied worldwide each year, supplying our planet with plentiful harvests. But that’s only part of the story. At Semilla Nueva, we have a lot of interest in how fertilizers can be used responsibly and sustainably to feed our growing planet and boost farmers’ incomes in the process.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
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Three Steps to Jumpstart Agriculture Mobile Payments: Step 3 – Overcoming farmers’ illiteracy, financial illiteracy and lack of trust
In the third and final post in his series on embedding mobile payments by large buyers to farmers into agricultural value chains, Lee Babcock considers the need to overcome farmers’ illiteracy, financial illiteracy and, perhaps most importantly, lack of trust.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Three Steps to Jumpstart Mobile Finance: Step 1 – Researching smallholders’ financial behavior to help them transition to mobile payments
It’s becoming increasingly clear that cash payment schemes are obsolete in the 21st century, says Lee Babcock. And in agriculture, there’s a growing recognition that enabling digital payments to smallholders is a huge opportunity, both for farmers and the mobile finance sector. In this three-part series, Babcock lays out three steps for embedding mobile money into agriculture development at the BoP.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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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