-
Q&A: Developing Entrepreneurship in Tibetan Settlements in India
Sambuddha Bhattacharya joined TechnoServe India as a Volunteer Consultant in April 2012. He has advised several leading Indian companies at KPMG Advisory and served as Strategy Consultant at India’s largest law firm, Amarchand Mangaldas. An entrepreneur himself, Sambuddha recently co-founded skillhippo.com, an online skills marketplace.
- Categories
- Agriculture
-
Micro Co-Ops for Macro Markets: Land O’Lakes finds success with dairy farmers in Malawi
The five-year program by Land O’Lakes, supported by a grant from USAID, set up or expanded 23 milk bulking groups across the country. The result? Farmers’ incomes were boosted, and they got access to productivity-enhancing inputs, insurance coverage, technical training and community prestige.
- Categories
- Agriculture
-
LINKing Smallholders : A guide on inclusive business models
The Linking Farmers to Markets programme is one of the six thematic areas of the Decision and Policy Analysis (DAPA) research programme at the International Center of Tropical Agriculture’s (CIAT). Since 2007 it has conducted action research on inclusive business models, which has been distilled in a participatory guide to Business Models that link smallholders to markets. The LINK Methodology aims to foster inclusive trading relationships between farmer organisations and formal markets.
- Categories
- Agriculture
-
Inclusive Compliance: The New Playing Field for Inclusive Business Innovations
Not all supply chains are the same, and not all of them are limited to structured factories or facilities. Difficulties arise when monitoring labor standards in informal sectors, such as evaluating environmental or social standards. This was the driving force behind inclusive compliance.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Impact Assessment
-
The BIG Smallholder Opportunity: ‘Growing Business with Smallholders’ practitioner workshop is Nov. 19-20 in Germany
It’s clear that smallholders are important partners for improving food security when considering that, with 500 million farms worldwide, they cultivate most of the land in developing countries. To achieve food security, effective mechanisms to equip smallholders with the right inputs and tools.
- Categories
- Agriculture
-
World Food Day: Availability, Access and Use : Stronger agricultural inputs, tools and financing are key
In much of the world populations are expanding dramatically with demand for food increasing in-step. Food security is composed of three facets; availability, access and use, and in many of the countries where we invest we see challenges across all three. At Acumen Fund we believe that a critical way to improve food security is by improving smallholder farmers’ access to stronger agricultural inputs, tools and financing. In a sector where innovation abounds, millions of smallholder farmers are still struggling to produce decent crop yields, resulting in poor nutrition, bad health and stagnant growth. For the last decade Acumen has been addressing this issue through a series of innovative investments in agriculture in Africa and South Asia.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
-
Sweetening the Deal: Empowering Peruvian Chocolatiers
From Oct. 2011 to July 2012, I worked in Tarapoto, a small Peruvian jungle town in the San Martin province. San Martin was known in the 1980s and ’90s as a hotbed of illicit coca production feeding the drug trade, but years of development efforts have since helped to make legitimate agriculture the engine keying the region’s rapid economic growth.
- Categories
- Agriculture
-
The $450 Billion Opportunity: Catalyzing Smallholder Agricultural Finance
As population growth and rising incomes create unprecedented demand for food, multinational companies increasingly rely on smallholders to secure their supply of agricultural commodities. As a result, smallholders present a compelling opportunity for buyers, lenders, and other actors in the agricultural value chain. However, smallholder production is often characterized by low yields, low quality, poor linkages, and little access to finance. A Dalberg report released Wednesday called “Catalyzing Smallholder Agricultural Finance” suggests that with increased financing, farmers can improve their yields and products and in some cases double their income.
- Categories
- Agriculture