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HOW WE HELP

We focus on future-proofing smallholder value chains by deeply understanding the human side of agriculture – the farmers, communities and eco-systems, their motivations, needs and barriers in transitioning to sustainable systems.

 

We partner with our clients and co-create transition pathways to sustainable agriculture by cutting through the noise, bringing pragmatic and fresh insight from the farmers in the field.

Our guiding principles

Desirability

Viability

Feasibility

Sustainability

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Sustainable Innovation Sweetspot

Informed by farmer centric design & co-creation with farmers, their communities and their influencers.

Examples of how we help

Organisation need:

Regenerative supply chain transformation

How The Sustainable Smallholder helps:

  • We work with the organisation and the smallholder farmers to co-create the optimal journey to regenerative farming:

  • We design the business model and look at bottlenecks that need to be overcome to support the smallholder farmer transition – e.g. access to affordable transition finance, access to markets, education programs

  • We co-create the agronomy protocol and practices – season by season

  • We design and co-create smallholder and stakeholder incentives to transition

Sustainable farming venture / pilot / new program design & set-up

  • We spend a lot of time with the target segments in the field.
    We understand their barriers, motivations and needs

  • We hypothesize the opportunities for value creation

  • We design different business models and value capture models

  • We design the business case and pilot implementation plan

  • We support the organisation in implementing the pilot and setting up a monitoring & evaluation system

Proof of concept, smallholder validation, commercial viability

  • We identify the different target segments

  • We spend a lot of time with the targets in the field. We deeply understand their barriers, motivations and needs

  • We evaluate them with farmers, community stakeholders and other influencers

  • We further co-create the concepts with farmers, community stakeholders and other influencers

  • We perform a willingness to pay analysis in the field

  • We crunch the numbers, develop financial scenarios (business cases, unit economics)

  • We help set up the pilot(s)

We want to build the skills of our teams on sustainability, sustainable smallholder farming, regenerative agriculture 

  • We identify and understand business objectives

  • We spend time with your team to understand the knowledge gaps and preferred ways to learn 

  • We design a tailor made capability building program 

Our expert and partner network

Through our long-standing network, The Sustainable Smallholder has direct access to relevant expertise, effective methodologies and frameworks, network and smallholder farmers in market.

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Established innovation consultants, specialized in sustainable business models creating shared value. Headquartered in London, covering the European and African market.

TSS and Mangrove work in partnership, leveraging each others’ core expertise,  experiences and bandwidth to deepen insights and accelerate delivery speed.
 

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The Sustainable Smallholder partners with founders and entrepreneurs in the smallholder farming space. Access to their insights, learnings and networks helps us derisk earlier and hit the ground running when validating for adoption and or planning to scale.

The Sustainable Smallholder also has standing partnerships in country across APAC (India, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Cambodia) with boutique market research agencies specialized in agriculture and smallholder farming. We also partner with influential country companies with access to smallholders – such as millers, traders and contract farmers

 

These partnerships enables us to hit the ground running through direct access to smallholder farmers and value chain players on the ground. It also enables us to uncover real insight and not repackage what we/clients already know.

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