Rikolto supports smallholder farmers in building the necessary capacities to sustainably improve productivity while ensuring food quality and safety. Developing strong business skills as a farmer organisation is key to becoming a reliable business partner.
To strengthen farmer organisations in becoming professional business organisations, we’ve been collaborating with SCOPEinsight—a leading provider of standardised assessment and analysis tools that measure farmer organisations’ level of professionalism. The tools provide a straightforward mechanism to discover strengths and weaknesses so the organisations can easily act upon them.
The SCOPE assessments can help you to identify and evaluate the performance gap. Our customised hands-on capacity-building approach covers different areas of farmer organisations’ professionalism, such as financial management, strategic planning, marketing and communication.
The professionalisation of farmer organisations is an objective shared by the members of AMEA, the Agribusiness Market Ecosystem Alliance, which was co-founded by Rikolto. The SCOPE methodology is considered as the standard tool for assessing the risk of doing business with small farmer organisations within AMEA.
Since 2016, Rikolto’s staff are trained in the use of SCOPE. Rikolto has assessed 186 farmer organisations to gain comprehensive insights into their business performance.
Rikolto is a great example of how SCOPE tools should be implemented and used worldwide.
SCOPE Basic is directed at emerging farmer organisations. The tool is designed to provide input for training and capacity building services as well as to facilitate supply chain linkages.
The SCOPE Basic assessment tool covers eight levels: Internal Management, Operations, Financial Management, Supply, Marketing, External Risks, Enablers and Sustainability.
SCOPE Pro is directed at more professional producer organisations, particularly small and medium agri-businesses, which have at least 3 years of financial statements and a management board.
It is designed to facilitate access to finance, markets, and inputs and covers all eight levels assessed with SCOPE Basic, and also looks at Financial Performance.
Scope Retail is aimed at strengthening the ability of input retailers in emerging markets to market products and services to their clients.
Most input retailers in emerging countries work informally, without access to business support they need in order to grow. A lack of business skills to support their marketing, accounting and overall management impacts their ability to increase profits, reach new markets and clients, and reduce inefficiencies in operations.
SCOPE assessments generate reports, which can be used to obtain an overview of the progress made by the farmer organisations. The reports serve as a basis for building their capacity and implementing various improvements. Buyers and financial service providers can also obtain objective information on the capacity of farmer organisations with which they are partnering or looking to partner with.
Assessments are important to point out concrete strengths and weaknesses of the farmer organisations which they might otherwise not have detected.
Since 2016, Rikolto has done 186 SCOPE assessments across a wide variety of countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. 136 were assessments of cooperatives and producer organisations with whom Rikolto partners in its programmes, to assess their business performance and engage in targeted capacity-building programmes. 50 assessments were commissioned by other organisations, such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC), wishing to gain comprehensive insights into their partners’ business performance. Of these 186 assessments,
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