Equal Exchange has a long history of working with small farmer co-operatives outside of our traditional role as a buyer. We have supported and implemented a number of projects and grant programs that complement their commercial activities while providing support to our cooperative partners, who continue to face unprecedented challenges. Equal Exchange has successfully helped co-ops to bring about systemic change, build capacity, innovate, and train current and future leaders. The work has been collaborative, and the impact has been far-reaching across coffee, cacao, banana, and sugar producer co-ops.
Over the last decade, partner co-op farms have been engaged in a USAID program known as the Cooperative Development Program (CDP), working with more than a dozen cooperatives in six different countries on productivity, governance, quality, gender equity, youth inclusion, and adaptation to climate change.
With the abrupt termination of USAID, these advances have ground to a halt. But they are determined to find a way forward and preserve key elements of our CDP project work at whatever scale they can reliably fund.
We have seen the impact that these programs can make on cooperative communities, both in bringing about change and in reinforcing their businesses so that farmers can stay on their land. It’s important that we continue to build on this success.
To this end Equal Exchange has created a new Small Farmer Fund as a way to pool community resources and continue this important development work.
Please join to learn more about this work and help alert more people to this additional opportunity to support small farmers and their cooperatives.
Register here: https://equalexchange.zoom.us/meeting/register/qzvFY777SrCIo-7TPSITjw#/registration
