A call for ‘great cases’: where has meaningful change happened in smallholder farmers’ lives?

Mint farmers in India. Image courtesy of the Farmer Income Lab.

Flor Marina, who lives in the agricultural town of San Luis, Colombia, worked on a passion fruit farm near her house but was never able to earn enough to begin her own operation. When she learned about a new program that supported economic development in her community, the Fundación Capital-run ‘Producing for my Future’ program, she signed up.

After receiving business training and coaching, Flor Marina received a disbursement—seed money, if you will. She bought 50 chickens, raising them to sell in town. Several months later, she used a second disbursement to double the size of her chicken coop, increasing her fledgling business’s capacity to grow. She sold more chickens and even composted their manure into organic fertilizer to cultivate more abundant crops in the family’s vegetable garden.

With the income from her small poultry farm, Flor Marina has climbed out of extreme poverty: She now has enough money to meet the family’s financial needs, including school expenses for her two children.   

The Farmer Income Lab (FIL), the collaborative think-do tank founded by Mars that aims to catalyze action to improve smallholder income, uncovered Flor Marina’s story last year. In 2018, the FIL looked at interventions aimed at empowering smallholder farmers to move out of poverty, things like poverty graduation programs, outgrower schemes, and savings-led groups. It found that the most successful often increased incomes by 50-100%—but, frustratingly, that this was not always enough to rise above the extreme poverty line. And 200-300% would have been needed to achieve a ‘living income.’

This year, FIL and its research partners Wageningen University, SocialSide, and Oxfam are turning the research process around, looking not at what’s been tried, but at what’s worked.

Can you help us by sharing the examples you think are truly great?

Please let us know why you think they’re great. For example:

• Have they catalyzed significant increases in farmers’ incomes?

• Have these increases reached significant numbers of farmers – perhaps including women or members of other disadvantaged groups?

• Have these increases lasted over time?

• And/or have there been systemic changes – for example in government policy or business practice – that suggest the impact will last, and perhaps even continue to grow?

We will need to find evidence of impact, and so would also love to receive any documents, links, or contact details you can easily come up with.

Your contribution will help us assemble a set of cases that all of us in this field are excited to learn from. We will score the ones we receive, and review available documentation for the top 10 to figure out what we know about how to emulate their success—as well as what we don’t know. We’ll share our findings in the fall, and look to collaborate in setting the agenda for more in-depth research. Ultimately, we hope to find insights companies and their partners can use to form next-generation strategies that help empower smallholder farmers in their supply chains to move out of extreme poverty, and attain living incomes.

Please send your tips to tatiana@socialsideinsight.com. And please share this post with others you know will have great cases to share.

We are grateful for your input and look forward to sharing the results!

Corporate Activism Needs More Substance, and Less Spin

A more visible, progressive business voice can be an important driver of needed policy change – if backed up by action and evidence  

Richard Gilbert, Managing Director, SocialSide

Companies and their CEOs are increasingly taking a public stand on social and environmental issues that matter to their businesses and to their employees, consumers and communities—using their voice and influence with governments to seek policy change.

Activist companies are going about this in two ways. On one hand, they are engaging in public policy advocacy directly, both individually and through coalitions. At the same time, they are mobilising and empowering their employees, consumers and communities to campaign on issues of shared concern.

Take The Body Shop, for example, which many consider to be the original activist company.  The company routinely harnesses its employees and customers in campaigns to support a variety of social and environmental causes. For example, the company recently gave a voice to eight million customers calling for a global ban on animal testing in cosmetics through a petition to the United Nations. The company also trains its employees to be effective advocates at point of sale and empowers them to engage directly with local and national policymakers. 

While The Body Shop still stands out, it is no longer alone.  For instance, many US companies have come out against the Trump administration’s immigration policy through individual and joint statements and more creative means like advertising, including Anheuser Busch’s famous commercial celebrating immigration. Cargill, alongside One, is campaigning to highlight that Poverty is Sexist and Mars has made high-profile calls for action on climate change. There are many other examples.

These examples hold promise and we hope to see more of them—especially from corporate sustainability leaders. These companies have identified social and environmental issues that are material to their business success. Their investors increasingly appreciate the links. They know they cannot address these issues alone, and that government has a particularly important role to play.

As major employers and investors, large companies often have access to influential ministers and the credibility to make the case for more progressive policies, including better regulation and enforcement. The Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), which campaigns for workplace rights around the world, often puts large companies at the head of country-level advocacy to reinforce the message that strengthening workplace rights attracts rather than deters foreign investment.

And in numerous stakeholder dialogues and interviews we have conducted here at SocialSide, on issues including water stewardship, food security, and human rights, civil society representatives consistently say that they want business to do more to engage government.

But while a more visible business voice could help to drive progress on these issues, the environment for it is not entirely welcoming.  Some governments, civil society organisations and academics remain highly sceptical about the motivations for business engagement and concerned about a lack of transparency in the way companies conduct their government relationships. These stakeholders have greater access to information than ever before to verify and challenge what companies say and do.

The sceptics have valid points. In our view, the answer is not for companies to pull out or shy away from engaging with government, but to do it better. From our experience, five key principles can help companies engage governments in support of critical policy changes in credible, legitimate and ultimately effective ways:

1. Be consistent and realistic: A recent study by Oxfam highlighted inconsistencies between companies’ advocacy on social causes and their lobbying on tax issues. Companies need to ensure that there is complete alignment between their stated values and policy positions and their business strategies, investments, and practices, and this needs to extend to the business organisations advocating on their behalf. And, rather than be relentlessly positive about their accomplishments, companies need to be more candid about the challenges and more comfortable talking about failure. Most stakeholders recognise that the issues companies are grappling with are tough, and greater openness on both sides will go a long way toward developing better policy solutions.   

2. Substantiate your policy positions: Companies should invest the time to understand and address the root causes of material social and environmental issues, and to gather evidence for the solutions they are proposing. Underpinning a policy argument with the best available information about what is needed builds trust, helps to unite stakeholders around shared priorities, and encourages a collective response. 

3. Tap into emotional drivers: At the same time, facts only get you so far.  Advocacy should look for opportunities to engage consumers, employees, and policymakers directly with the issues first hand or through compelling storytelling, which is key to bringing a policy issue to life and sparking an emotional response.

4. Ensure leadership support:  Policy advocacy needs to be owned at the top of the company by the leadership team. The Edelman Trust Barometer shows that a high percentage of consumers expect CEOs personally to take a stand on values-related issues. Leaders need to set the tone and empower advocacy champions, who understand the issues and how to campaign, to galvanise action.   

5. Join forces:  Developing shared positions that represent a broad range of stakeholder groups can build legitimacy and the political capital governments need to make policy change happen. Combining economic with social, humanitarian and environmental arguments can be particularly effective. For example, 2030 WRG, a global partnership that supports country-level collaboration to achieve water security, recognises that the issue of water security is as political as it is technical. It therefore brings government officials together with representatives from business and civil society to understand the water challenges they face, develop shared priorities, and work in groups to pilot cost-effective solutions that inform policy innovations and reforms.

Financing Nutrition

With growing levels of private investment flowing into agriculture and food, a new white paper identifies what it will take to pull it into nutritious food value chains that benefit the world’s poor

One in three people around the world are malnourished, often because food systems are not delivering nutritious foods that people want, at prices they can afford.  There are a number of reasons for this. Nearly half of fresh fruits and vegetables spoil before they reach markets, foods high in calories, salt and sugar are often cheaper and more convenient, and climate change and environmental degradation are reducing food yields at a time when population numbers are rising.

These challenges present opportunities for business. Production of diverse foods beyond staple crops to include fruits, vegetables, and sources of protein. New technologies that dramatically reduce crop loss and food waste. Manufacturing and marketing that make nutritious food more affordable, available, and aspirational to local populations.

In developing and emerging markets, the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that make up the bulk of the food system—along with smallholder farmers—have key roles to play.

Investment in the food and agriculture sector is growing.  Investment advisory firm Valoral has tracked an increase in the number of investment funds specialized in food and agriculture from 38 to 446 between 2005 and 2017. However, more than 60% of the assets under management by these funds are invested in North America and Europe. Only 6% are invested in the Asia Pacific region and 4% in Africa. And SMEs often fail to attract financing because they have modest needs, limited collateral, and uncertain growth prospects. 

So how do we attract greater investment into these companies, which have such critical roles to play in tackling malnutrition?

Our new paper developed with the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School for the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) starts to answer this question.  

We identify three building blocks that must be in place to connect the supply of investment to the demand from SMEs in what we call “nutritious food value chains”:

1)    A clear understanding of the opportunity space.  In our interviews with investors, the first question we were almost always asked was, “What do you mean by nutritious foods?”  Investors need to know “what counts” as nutritious foods and what kinds of companies help get them to consumers.  

2)    Innovative approaches to investment.  We will need to think beyond the confines of traditional equity and debt, bundle different types and sources of financing, and deploy technical assistance and business development services alongside investment capital.

3)     An enabling environment. While more supportive public policy and better functioning infrastructure will be important, growing consumer demand for more nutritious foods is going to be the linchpin.  This is currently an uphill battle against taste preferences and entrenched cultural attitudes and represents a huge marketing challenge.  But with growing evidence of a shift towards healthier lifestyles among certain sectors, there is cause for hope. 

In the paper, we suggest a number of actions that could be taken to drive progress in each of these areas.

GAIN is already working to put these building blocks in place. The challenge is systemic, and it’s going to be a long-term, cross-sector, multi-stakeholder effort bridging the agriculture, food, nutrition, and investment communities across business, government, and civil society.

GAIN is working to catalyze and align their efforts by speaking out about nutritious foods and nutritious food value chains, developing nutrition investment metrics, fostering an investable agri-food SME pipeline, pioneering innovative financing platforms, commissioning important policy research, and influencing existing IFIs and DFIs to look more closely at nutritious food value chains. This kind of “system leadership” role is critical to nutrition and so many other development goals. We look forward to learning from GAIN’s example.

The Social Side of Water Security

2030 Water Resources Group

There’s a social side to every environmental issue.

On one level, it’s about the impact of the issue on people. On people’s physical and psychological health, the economic opportunities available to them, the behaviors they might have to change. There are important questions about whether impacts are spread equitably.

On another level, it’s about the way stakeholders interact to find solutions. How consumers and companies, the civil society groups and industry associations that represent them, and their governments come together to understand the issue, share their priorities, chart a course forward, and manage the trade-offs.

It’s vital to take the social side of environmental issues into account. Technical expertise is essential, but it isn't enough. The process can be complex and even downright messy, but to drive change, organizations have to build the political capital that change requires.

A new case study we wrote with Jane Nelson at the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School offers some useful lessons about how to do it (executive summary here).

The case study analyzes the experience and approach of the 2030 Water Resources Group, a global partnership that supports country-level collaboration to achieve water security by 2030. This is a critical challenge. By 2030, global demand for water is expected to exceed supply by 40%. Some geographies are in crisis already. Taps in Cape Town, South Africa may run dry by April this year.

The 2030 Water Resources Group (2030 WRG) was incubated by the World Economic Forum and hosted at the International Finance Corporation until it became part of the World Bank’s Water Global Practice this year. In 14 countries and states, 600 organizations across sectors are now working together on projects and policy reforms with support from 2030 WRG. These projects and policy reforms vary according to country context and needs, and are identified by the stakeholders who will implement them. Common themes include agricultural water use efficiency, industrial water use efficiency, and wastewater treatment and reuse. Expected impacts include saving 55 million m3 of fresh water per year through projects in South Africa and Peru and reducing untreated wastewater emissions in India’s Ganga river basin by 34 milion m3 per year.

Early on, 2030 WRG was criticized for failing to take the social side of water security sufficiently into account. The group promoted a new analytical approach, called the cost curve, which was originally developed by McKinsey & Co. for climate. This approach attracted enormous attention and elevated water to the head of state level, often for the first time. But when it came to moving from analysis to action, 2030 WRG struggled to gain buy-in from critical stakeholders looking at the economics alone. For example, one social dimension that mattered to bilateral donors especially was gender. 2030 WRG now factors the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of water security into its analyses and has an explicit gender strategy intended to ensure that women and men share responsibility for and access to water resources.

2030 WRG’s core contribution is an institutional model that brings diverse water sector stakeholders together. The group convenes relevant government ministries, major private sector water users, businesses in strategic growth sectors, solution providers from the technology, engineering, and financial services sectors, and civil society organizations representing important issues and communities. These stakeholders often have no prior experience working together and significant levels of mistrust. Some are joining the water dialogue for the first time.

With 2030 WRG’s support, these stakeholders work together to understand the scope and dimensions of the water challenges they face. They develop shared priorities and work together in groups to pilot cost-effective solutions – including innovative financing mechanisms that blend public, private, and philanthropic capital. In so doing, they find new ways of implementing existing policy and informing policy change. And in the process, they build the political capital that change requires. This has the effect of making the process of water policy dialogue and decision-making more explicit and transparent.

To accomplish this, 2030 WRG has had to develop a good understanding of the political economy of change in each country in which it engages. It has had to develop sophisticated facilitation skills, and to cultivate a strong network of allies or “champions” willing to fight for its approach, represent it to others, and convince them to participate.

This skillset is crucial for organizations working on complex, systemic challenges, from water security to agricultural development to nutrition. But it isn’t yet common. Across sectors and issue areas, more organizations need to build these capabilities if we are to achieve sustainable, inclusive business growth and deliver the SDGs. Organizations with the experience, like 2030 WRG, can help by sharing what they know.