The Partnership for Sustainable Coffee strengthens underserved smallholder coffee farmer businesses. The three-year project has built climate resilience and market competitiveness for over 180 coffee enterprises across Peru, Colombia, Honduras, Rwanda, Uganda, and Indonesia. The Partnership employs a four-pronged approach that combines private sector engagement with public sector investment to improve the lives of over 300,000 smallholder farmers through advisory services, access to credit, an innovative grant mechanism (“Resilience Funds”), and workshops to build market intelligence (“Extraordinary Coffee Workshops”).
With a clear vision in mind, the project team was able to make the following achievements during their participation in the acceleration program:
KDP’s experience in the Incubator surfaced new opportunities for inclusive growth in their supply chain.
- They established connections with like-minded companies outside of their traditional coffee networks
- They gained new perspective on the business case for inclusive supply chain investments:
- They defined key capacities of upstream suppliers, strengthened through Root Capital services (for example, financial management)
- They demonstrated that these capacities are linked to improved trading outcomes with KDP (for example, on-time delivery performance)
- They monetized the value of these improved trading outcomes for KDP (for example, avoided “spot” purchases)
A next step is to advocate for the capacity building of upstream suppliers.
