Partner organisations

The graphs below give a general overview of our partnermix. We mainly partner with farmer organisations or cooperatives. However, since we operate in food systems, we also work closely with different national and local government institutions, research institutes, investors and social lenders, and include private companies in our programme interventions. None of these companies receive any funding. In our GoodFood@School programme Belgium many schools are involved.

In 2018, Rikolto financially supported  88 organisations in 15 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Of these, 62% were farmer organisations, while the remaining 38% were local NGOs or commodity platforms.

In total we work with 102 farmer organisations, cooperatives or farmer groups. All of them are supported in their business development, but not all of them receive funding. We sometimes only give specific advice or provide trainings.  

39 of the farmer organisations we work with produce their crop in accordance with one or more of international or local certification schemes.

Most of our interventions directly target members of farmers’ organisations. This, in turn, allows us to indicate precisely how many men and women are benefiting per region (see graphs below). Over 67,000 men and 34,000 women received Rikolto’s support in 2018.

In many cases, however, more farmers are involved in collective sales. Moreover, it is an inherent part of our strategy to achieve policy changes within companies, at commodity sector level and in national legislation, and to encourage other organisations and governments to replicate successful experiences on a much larger scale, so that multiple farming families benefit from our interventions. 

We have managed to reach an increasing number of farmers over the past few years. Most of the organisations have grown in terms of membership, because of the commercial opportunities this brings for the farmers.

There has been a significant increase in supported farmers in Indonesia as Rikolto has joined a consortium led by the Dutch NGO ICCO to train rice farmers in Central Java in good agricultural practices, inclusive business practices and to support women's entrepreneurship. Since 2017, we have been running a programme in East Africa to promote the collective sale of surplus food crops, in which very large numbers of farmers are directly involved. In West Africa, farmers have been organising themselves by commodity for many years, resulting in very large farmers’ organisations. In Vietnam, a big part of our programme is directed towards vegetable consumers (raising awareness), and policy work on safe vegetables. These figures do not appear in this graph. Moreover, a new rice programme, involving a large number of farmers, has been prepared, but activities only started in 2019. 

Although the gender gap decreased a little bit in 2018, there is still a huge difference when we look at the farmers, we support directly via their organisations. About two-thirds of the members of farmers’ organisations are men. However, in most of our regions we see specific interventions to give more opportunities to women.