Sustainability Management Services (SMS) implements sustainability programs and provides products and services for rural populations. SMS has made commitments about its economic impact on farmer livelihoods and sees farmers earning a living Income as an important milestone.
For Ghanaian cocoa farmers, yield appears to be the driver that has the highest potential to increase farmer income. Many interventions have been implemented and piloted surrounding yield, quality, and price improvements for farmers to raise farmer income. However, today, the cocoa sector can still be characterized by severe poverty, food insecurity and deforestation which highlights the urgency for new interventions.
For SMS, and for ECOM more broadly, supplying services that enable farmers to generate alternative incomes has become attractive. For SMS this broader focus on household incomes potentially increases its farmer base as it would allow the organization to serve non-cocoa farmers and cocoa farmers with additional services. For smallholder farmers, creating and streamlining alternative markets could lead to increased farm revenues and income resilience and a reduction of household cost.
To this end, this SDM analysis seeks to answer: “how can SMS scale up its non-cocoa services in an effective and integrated way, enabling farmers to earn a living income and beyond?”