Professionalising farmer organisations

A woman voicing her opinion in a cooperative meeting

Do you represent a farmer organisation? Is your organisation struggling to implement sustainable production and processing practices, or to meet quality standards? Are you looking to strengthen your farmer organisation’s business skills, and improve its access to markets, finance and inputs?

Explore how our local network can support your organisation with capacity building to leverage market opportunities locally and globally.

Do you represent a financial institution? Are you seeking to invest in smallholder farmer organisations, but find it challenging to identify bankable opportunities in the agricultural sector?

We can provide access to and understanding of bankable farmer organisations. Our staff are trained in the use of SCOPE, a tool designed to assess the performance of producers’ organisations. The SCOPE profiles we provide can help you to assess and identify bankable opportunities and expand your pipeline quickly and cost-effectively.

Our approach

1. Excellent assessment and business tools

We assess the level of professionalism of farmer organisations and identify areas for targeted capacity-building.

To this end we use SCOPE, a tool designed to assess the performance of producer organisations. SCOPE assessments weigh several dimensions, ranging from internal and financial management skills to business-savviness, access to finance, and evaluate their influence on trading relations. The assessments offer comprehensive insights into the business performance of these organisations.

What results is a dashboard that provides an accessible analysis and benchmarks the results to target capacity-building on the lowest-scoring aspects. These SCOPE profiles not only serve as a baseline for capacity-building but can also be useful for investors as they seek to assess and identify bankable opportunities.

Scope tool

Do you want to know more about the SCOPE tool itself, the different ways it can be used to address your needs, or Rikolto’s prior experience in implementing SCOPE assessments?

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2. Customised trainings

Rikolto can provide a tailored training approach to strengthen the capacity of farmer organisations to be good service providers for their members and reliable suppliers of agricultural produce for the market.

Our customised, hands-on capacity building support ranges from quality control, financial management, strategic planning and business model development to technical assistance, marketing and communication. These customised trainings will strengthen organisations’ business management skills, productivity and effectiveness.

  • If you represent a farmer organisation, this will set you apart for potential financial and business partners.
  • If you represent a financial institution, the customised capacity-building of your investee can mitigate risks for you.

3. Improved access to markets, finance and inputs

Rikolto can support you to work towards inclusive commercial relationships with your partners, whether you are a farmer organisation, buyer, investor or service provider.  

To this end, we use the LINK methodology, a participatory method created by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and other organisations within the Sustainable Food Lab, to foster inclusive commercial relationships between smallholder producers and private companies. The purpose is to link chain actors more effectively and improve their relationship step by step, using a toolkit as a process to move forward.

As facilitator of this methodology, Rikolto engages with farmer organisations and companies to work towards long-lasting business relationships. We do so by building trust and transparency throughout the chain, enhancing learning processes and discovering new opportunities for innovation.

Link methodology

Do you want to know more about LINK, how it can be used to render the commercial relationship you are involved in more inclusive, or Rikolto’s prior experience with LINK?

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4. Increased insights in the inclusion of smallholder farmers

If you want to capture the voice of producers, producer organisations and/or companies you work with to consolidate inclusive business relationships, Rikolto can support you.

Rikolto has developed the Inclusive Business Scan, powered by Sensemaker™, as a tool to capture the voice of producers, producer organisations and companies.

The tool captures real-time feedback on inclusive business in smallholder supply chains. SenseMaker is an innovative approach based on the collection of large amounts of micro-narratives that are self-signified (interpreted) by the storyteller. In so doing, respondents make a primary assessment of their stories, adding a deeper layer of meaning to the stories and removing the potential bias of a third party interpreting the data.

The insights of the Inclusive Business Scan will allow you to guide future actions and interventions in the commodity chains. They can also support you in your role as chain actor and improve value chain interventions.

Inclusive Business Scan

Do you want to know more about how the Inclusive Business Scan insights can serve your needs, or Rikolto’s prior experience in giving a voice to value chain actors?

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Questions?

Reach out to me. I'll gladly put you in touch with our experts, who can give you more information on how any of these tools can benefit your work.

Marianne Vergeyle

marianne.vergeyle@rikolto.org