Annual Report

This was 2020...

We support farmer organisations in their business development, so that they are able to market the products of their members in a professional way, leading to stable incomes for farmers and more sustainable food available for consumers.

When the pandemic struck, we set up a Covid response team with colleagues from our different offices.

As physical meetings came to a halt, farmer communities lost access to business development services and technical assistance. For our own programmes, this meant organising the necessary capacity building moments for our partners online.

UNERIZ developed a Covid-19 emergency action plan to subsidise rice parboiling kits for 110 additional women parboilers with the support of Rikolto.

In Senegal, Rikolto supported FENPROSE and FEPROBA to create Youth and Women Committees within their organisations, to ensure that their specific needs (access to inputs, finance or training) are taken into account.

In partnership with over 20 organisations including Fairtrade, Lavazza, Root Capital, UNDP, Green Climate Fund, PROMECAFÉ, Cospe, ProAmazonía and national coffee associations & ministries, we organised the Latin American Virtual Coffee Dialogues.

Investing in young people to harvest future-proof solutions. In 2020, Generation Food incubators were set up in Leuven (Belgium), Arusha (Tanzania) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). Through Generation Food we reached more than 500 young entrepreneurs.

Rikolto facilitated the participation of the Association of Coffee and Cocoa Exporters (ASSECCAF) in the African Fine Coffee Association event in Mombasa in early February, before the pandemic struck. It led to a boom in the visibility of Congolese coffee

Rikolto has sat on theRikolto replicated the application of the SRP standard in Dong Thap and Kien Giang provinces: the number of hectares under SRP transition went from 25 ha in 2019 to 2589 ha in 2020.

In Bandung, a food sharing application, BADAMI, went live in December 2020. The app, promoted by the Bandung City Government, connects food suppliers & consumers through an online marketplace for fresh foods and a food sharing and donations hub.

"New ways of working and communicating, often from home, being more flexible, and isolated from colleagues."

Chris Claes - Rikolto´s executive director

Covid response

When the pandemic struck, we set up a Covid response team with colleagues from our different offices. Our Covid response had two rhythms. Firstly, we focused on the urgent, short-term needs of our partners. Secondly, we started supporting our partners in finding ways to set up innovative initiatives to strengthen their resilience to this crisis, and others to come in the future.

Partner organisations

In 2020, Rikolto financially supported 136 organisations in 15 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, compared to 129 the previous year. Of these, 55% are farmers’ organisations, compared to 52% the year before. Globally, 109,156 farmers received Rikolto’s support, of which 69,537 men and 39,619 women.

In 2020

Network organisation

In 2020, we worked with a total of 207 farmer organisations, farmer cooperatives or farmer groups. 191 of them are supported in their business development; the remaining ones are national-level farmer unions or federations with whom we focus on advocacy work. Not all of these receive funding: we sometimes only give specific advice or provide trainings. 22 of the farmer organisations we work with are certified 'organic', 16 organisations are Fair Trade certified, 4 are UTZ certified, and 6 Global GAP.

Planning, Learning and Accountability

Rikolto engages comprehensively in Planning, Learning and Accountability (PLA) through a monitoring and evaluation system that mainly aims to learn from successes and failures. The PLA system provides a framework for the systematic collection of data and the use of this data for continuous programme adjustments. Moreover, PLA also seeks to stimulate critical reflection internally, among colleagues working in similar interventions across the globe and with external stakeholders.

See our impact

Up until the edition of 2019, Rikolto drafted its Annual Report in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). As part of our new strategy development for 2022-2026, we undertook an external stakeholder consultation in January 2021. 37 stakeholders representing funders, private companies, farmer cooperatives, sector platforms, city governments, investors etc. from all regions we are active in provided their feedback on our new strategy, our data and reporting system and the Annual Report specifically. The aim hereof was a new list of ‘material’ aspects Rikolto would report on, in line with the GRI standard.

However, the external stakeholder consultation has shown us that the large majority of our stakeholders do not consider the GRI standard as an added value for organisations like Rikolto. For this reason, we have decided to abandon the GRI standard in our annual reporting. We remain committed to transparency and integrity and see this as an opportunity to improve and innovate our reporting practices, specifically as we start implementing our new strategy.

People and Organisation

In 2020, Rikolto had 196 employees worldwide, which is about the same number as the year before. Several years ago, men were clearly in the majority in the organisation. In 2020, 45 % of our staff are women. There is an interesting difference between our offices in Belgium, Asia and Latin America on the one hand and West Africa, East Africa and DR Congo on the other hand. In the last group, proportionately many more men are employed, whereas there are more women on board in the first group.

Read the full 2020 Annual Report

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