Overview
We work with vulnerable people who operate as small producers (farms, forests, allied industries, fisheries and MSMEs) to enhance their livelihoods. Our overall objective is to promote wealthy, resilient and responsible small producers at a national scale through inclusive entrepreneurship. Our approach to build wealth for small producers focuses on having effective market engagement and co-creating business solutions that benefit both businesses and small producers.
Our Ethos
Strengthening small producers and their livelihoods at a national scale lies at the heart of our mission, and our work is built on a set of core beliefs and learnings.
We believe that market-driven and market-led supply chain development is beneficial for small producers given the volume and value of operations rather than production-based work
Commodity-specific and end-to-end operations are the best pathways to maximise returns
Small producers, on their own, find it difficult to access and thrive in the marketplace, given the scale, quality, investment, skills, and expertise required. Therefore, a business service organisation partnership with entities like Vrutti and Fuzhio is critical for their betterment
Ensuring small producers receive reasonable prices for the risk and effort they put into the value chain
Maximising the proportion of the consumer pie and reaching small producers
Calibrating bundled services (market channel, capital, and capacity building) and addressing their interdependencies to make it work for the entrepreneur
Working through collectives or clusters to bring power—collective agency—to deal with the ecosystem
Working with established market players and engaging with them as supply chain partners through co-investment is an effective way
- Building programmatic models and approaches
- Engaging and shaping investments and policies
- Providing technical and strategic support to organisations
- Leveraging technology-enabled platforms and directly implementing programmes at scale
Our Approaches
We ensure that our beliefs are turned into action by employing impactful
approaches like:
We use multiple levers to achieve our vision, such as:
How We Work
By building capacities for various actors (internal and external) based on market opportunities and institutional architecture.
By facilitating appropriate financial services throughout the value chain—incubation, production, processing, marketing, and so on.
By forging business partnerships and orchestrating a range of solutions.
By providing technical support—value chain studies, landscape studies, feasibility studies, business planning, hand-holding and mentoring support, institutional diagnosis and assessments, quality assurance systems, technology products, etc.
Vrutti has a strong grassroot presence and domain expertise, works on the mobilisation and institutionalisation (institutions and clusters) of small producers in order to build their collective agency and supply chain readiness.
Fuzhio specialises in marketing, bringing market opportunities to entrepreneurs, and developing a market-ready supply chain.
The GREEN Foundation has a strong expertise in biodiversity and conservation, works to promote sustainable, climate-friendly practices.
To address the various levers of impact, we work with a number of
organisations like:
We implemented a number of important initiatives, including:
Working with Vrutti, the 3-Fold model aims at building wealth, resilience, and responsibility for smallholder farmers by working end-to-end on five major value chains. This model delivers six key services, customised and bundled, to the farmers. This programme has been working in six states with over 70,000 small and marginal farmers through 29 Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs).
Walmart Vriddhi Supplier Development Program – Working with Walmart, the Walmart Vriddhi program works with 50,000 Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in India to expand their domestic capabilities and participate in the global economy. It offers on-demand learning and personalised mentoring for MSMEs, as well as onboarding and incubation support on Flipkart and Walmart Marketplaces.
Working with SEWA Bharat, we are providing mentoring support for strengthening Bihar’s only women-led Karnabhoomi Farmer Producer Company, set up in 2018 by 750 women shareholders across two districts: Munger and Bhagalpur.
Investing
for Impact
We want to achieve impact at scale by co-investing with change agents to shape solutions and investments. Some of the work we have implemented in this regard is outlined below:
We work towards the holistic development of small producers and to pave the way to a brighter future. All our work is geared towards achieving the UN SDGs, specifically Goals 1, 2, 5, 10, 11, and 17.
