Food and agriculture

The opportunity: smallholders feed the world

Of the 200 million farms globally, 90% are less than 2 hectares. Smallholder farmers are often poor. Climate change is creating additional risks for them. At the same time, agriculture is a major contributor of carbon emissions, as well as a carbon sink.

Nutrition remains a challenge for rural as well as urban low-income consumers. Malnutrition as well as obesity create a double burden.

  • How can we enable small farmers to manage risks better and enhance their productivity while regenerating natural resources?
  • How can we enable everyone to access healthy food while feeding back into the nutrition cycle?

Our contribution

We facilitate inclusive systems innovations that serve smallholder farmers and low-income consumers. Reach out to us if you would like to:

Design

your role in a future food system that includes small farmers and provides all consumers with access to healthy nutritious food.

Implement

collaborative projects to make the food system more inclusive and regenerative.

Evaluate

your intervention together with partners and smallholders and/or consumers to refresh your collaboration.

Projects

We have implemented projects to develop an inclusive and regenerative food and agriculture system with public sector partners, large companies and social enterprises. Some examples:

Coaching companies to work with smallholders

In India and Vietnam, we are coaching 30 agribusiness companies with support from UN-ESCAP to identify and implement opportunities to collaborate with smallholder farmers. At the same time, we develop local coaching services to make the support available in the future.

Increasing access to and benefits of public ag insurance

India has one of the largest agricultural insurance schemes for smallholders: PMFPY is a government-led scheme implemented in partnership with private insurance companies. Our pilot seeks to improve the value of this scheme. Precision Agriculture for Development with add information on the scheme to its existing ag advisory services to facilitate uptake and claims. Earth Analytics India will provide data that can assess damage from satellite images even during the cloudy season. The pilot is supported by the InsuResilience Solutions Fund.

Scaling up regenerative cocoa in Ghana

Swiss chocolate manfufacturer Halba has successfully piloted a scheme where cocoa is grown with dynamic agroforestry. The ii2030 track brought together local and international partners to align on ways to scale up the approach. Insights led informed a funding proposal and the work is currently underway.

What our partners say:

“Endeva has been supporting us to bring Blooom.farm to scale. Through Meet&Multiply, we could replicate in Latin America and Africa. Through ii2030, we generated new partners to achieve systemic change. The Endeva team is dedicated to impact and effective in bringing the right partners together”
KC Mishra, Founder of eKutir and Blooom.farm

Publications

Interested to innovate with us?

Dr. Christina Tewes-Gradl

c.gradl@endeva.org

Other priority systems

Learn more

about energy systems

Learn more

about mobility systems

Learn more

about health systems