With support from the Small Foundation, we launched the Coffee Farmer Thriving Index in East Africa. The index is a standardized survey instrument that can be delivered cost effectively by phone. It measures the holistic wellbeing of farmers across four key themes: living standards, food security, resilience, and a farmers’ own outlook on the future of coffee as a livelihood.
In 2023, we surveyed thousands of coffee farmers in Uganda and Rwanda. Participating coffee brands and cooperatives can benchmark the wellbeing of the farmers in their supply chain with the Uganda national average.
Our collective vision is to encourage the coffee sector–and all sectors that source from smallholders–to listen directly to farmers about their own wellbeing. We believe that standardized measures of farmer wellbeing can increase transparency and help companies remaining accountable to the farmers they work with.
This initiative was a pilot, to test the concept, and demonstrate the power of standardized measurement grounded in farmer voice. We learned an enormous amount–from the thousands of farmers we spoke with, and from the coffee brands, cooperatives, and exporters we partnered with–and we will continue to learn more as we share this report with the sector. We also want to hear from you!
We have already undertaken two pilots in Ghanaian cocoa sector as part of our Cocoa Farmer Thriving Index. The first in late 2022 surveyed 150 farmers, the second in early 2023 included a further 750 interviews with farmers across the Western, Eastern, and Ashanti regions.
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