Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation relaunches as Producers Direct with a new strategy aiming at scaling out the impact of Centres of Excellence across the regions where we work. This exciting name change reflects our farmer-led model and strengthening commitment and direct relationships with smallholder farmers.    

Centres of Excellence launched in Peru adding 2 more to the network of centres pioneering farmer-led support. 

Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation becomes the first UK charity to secure VC funding for a charity project when WeFarm successfully completed its first funding round in March 2017. With this funding WeFarm is able to hire a new tech team and build the next generation of the platform and start to generate useful insights from their data.

Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation also expands its own exploration into farmer-led data. Thanks to a $1million award from the Global Resilience Partnership  work has begun to develop systems that can empower farmers to claim ownership over, and use, their own data to make on-farm and business decisions.

Centres of Excellence are launched in East Africa. This exciting event was held at the end of January in the beautiful hills of Nandi County, Kenya. During this event each of the CoEs presented their work to our network of East African partners and we were all able to visit one of Sireet’s demonstration farms to get a flavour of what a training at a Centre of Excellence looks like.

Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation also held Peru’s answer to East Africa’s IMP, with the Feria de Innovaciones Agrícolas in Huadquiña, Cusco. Not only did this give the opportunity for  Peruvian farmers to share their innovative ideas, but also to collaborate on the development of Centres of Excellence in Peru and witness how Huadquiña itself was capitalising on location near Machu Picchu to diversify incomes for the cooperative and its farmers.

Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation spins off WeFarm as a for-profit subsidiary. Although taking half of the Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation team with it, it enabled WeFarm to scale much more rapidly reaching 26,000 users by the end of the year. This year Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation also began to scale out its own activities with initiation of the development of Centres of Excellence in Peru. With funding from Big Lottery Fund, Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation was able to increase the team in Latin America and work with farmers to assess how the Centre of Excellence model can be brought to Peru.

Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation convened all their producer partners in East Africa together to hold an “Innovation Marketplace” in Kenya. This event brought farmers together to share pioneering to farming challenges. Sharing existing ideas such as bio-gas generators, pitching innovations, and hacking new solutions together highlighted the amazing low cost methods that farmers could be and are implementing on their farms. This year also saw the rapid development of WeFarm, for which Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation won the UK Google Impact Challenge. This prestigious £500k award enabled the expansion of WeFarm’s reach and the development of its technology  as well as for it to spin off and become a social enterprise in its own right (see 2015).

Building on the initial work, Producers Direct begins to look at how sustainable systems can be built around the development and scaling out smallholder innovations.  With support from Comic Relief, Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation started in the development of a network of farmer-led Centres of Excellence that support lead farmers to develop further innovations and share their learnings with other farmers. Seeing the benefits of matching an in-person with a digital approach, Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation worked with farmers to develop WeFarm, which uses basic mobile phones to allow farmers to share ideas and crowdsource innovative solutions.

Cafédirect Producers‘ Foundation invests £450,000 in over 90 projects across Africa and Latin America. These projects aimed to strengthen the organisational and business capacity of smallholder producer organisations as well to make investments into the innovative approaches that smallholder farmers are taking to tackle key challenges they face.