Developing common indicators for farm-level coffee sustainability

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Towards collective impact
Harmonising indicators
Developing sectoral consensus
Enabling access to credit

Introduction

Project details

Project Title: Demonstrating Collective Impact in the Global Coffee Sector

Lead Organisation: Global Coffee Platform (GCP)

Partners: UTZ, Rainforest Alliance, Committee on Sustainability Assessment (COSA)

Duration: February 2018 - April 2019

coffee cherries © David Dudenhoefer, Rainforest Alliance

Towards collective impact

With a growing number of stakeholders interested in demonstrating their collective sustainability impact, there's never been a better time to drive alignment around collective reporting.

Stakeholders from brands, NGOs and government agencies often collect and require information on a broad set of similar, but slightly different indicators. This results in a lack of alignment in both the data they collect and how that data is represented, which in turn limits their ability to share, combine or use this data in a meaningful way.

Drone footage of coffee in Uganda © Giuseppe Cipriani for UTZ

Harmonising indicators

Harmonising indicators within sectors and across supply chains is a big challenge, but it's one which multi-stakeholder initiatives like sustainability standards are able to embrace. Building consensus within a sector is a core function of a standard. This consensus, coupled with an assurance mechanism that supports data collection within supply chains, makes standards very powerful tools to lead harmonisation efforts. The benefits of harmonised indicators include an ability to:

Demonstrate impact
Develop targeted farmer services and technology
Create added value from data interoperability
Reduce the effort of data collection while improving quality
Support traceability
Facilitate certification audits

Drying coffee beans in Brazil © UTZ CERTIFIED

Developing sectoral consensus

GCP, UTZ, Rainforest Alliance and COSA came together to unleash the power of data in the coffee sector, by co-developing a set of common indicators for coffee sustainability. Applicable globally and with relevance across the sector, these common indicators come with detailed technical descriptions of how data points should be represented, allowing data exchange between different technical systems. The data standard is accessible here.

Enabling access to credit

The project also explored how these common indicators could create additional value for coffee farmers. One area where the project identified potential was in the ability of this data to facilitate agricultural lending to smallholder farmers. Smallholder farmers tend to be regarded as high risk by lenders, often due to a lack of traditional data points to support risk assessment. Lenders are looking for alternative data points to support risk allocation, and indicators on farm performance offer one such opportunity.