Over 500 million smallholder farmers generate a third of the global food supply. While billions are invested in efforts to support these farmers, systems to monitor these programs are too complex, lack scalability, and fail to include farmers’ perspectives, making effective comparison challenging.
60 Decibels developed the Farmer Thriving Index as a simple, standardized tool for measuring farmer wellbeing, because we believe that impact measurement should be easy and powered by farmer voice.
The Farmer Thriving Index measures farmer wellbeing across four dimensions grounded in the farmer’s own perspectives. It is a short, easy-to-implement survey. The tool is standardized, making it applicable to a farmer in any context or value chain, and making the results comparable across different populations.
Do farmers have access to the elements of a decent standard of living?
Are farmers resilient to shocks or stresses?
Do farmers perceive their livelihood as viable?
How food secure are farmer households?
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!
