Bonn Event: A multi-stakeholder learning exchange on measurement and strategies for action

This session introduced the objectives and main work areas of the Living Income CoP, framed how the workshop contributed to our overall aims, and explain how the agenda fit into the CoP’s objectives on measurement of actual incomes and living income benchmarks. It also reviewed key concepts and definitions. 

Experience with and issues arising with comparing actual income to living income benchmarks, based on the West Africa cocoa and East Africa coffee experience. This session was also used to consider how the community of practice can create guidance on comparing actual incomes with living income benchmarks. It was discussed that alignment on key principles for income measurement would be useful to support actors in their efforts. 

This session identified commonalities in challenges in relation to living wage and living income and how our communities can help or work together in solving those. It explored 1) in what ways are organisations working on living wage and/or living income and why are both important; 2) what are the common challenges in working on living wage / income issues? and 3) how could our communities help / work together in solving those?

This session drew on on recent research from the Mars Farmer Income Lab and the Living Income CoP to propose a framework for the day to track the interrelationships of strategies to improve farmer incomes. This session highlighted that there is no silver bullet to increasing incomes however achieving income improvements requires learning from other's experiences in trying to do so.

This session explored how to increase the access to affordable finance to smallholders and how to couple loans with technical assistance. It focused on how data on smallholder segmentation and needs can be used to create and implement appropriate financial products or services for smallholders to help them to improve their incomes.

This session explored how to implement professional diversification using examples from the vanilla, coffee and cocoa sectors. What is needed at the cooperative level? What’s needed at farm services level? Discussions were had around the challenges of maintaining investment in secondary crop growth  in primary crop boom periods, however the importance of diversification and identifying viable co-productive crops was emphasised to support the resiliency of smallholder incomes.

In this part of the event, breakouts were held to discuss in further detail the work planned and being done in the Cocoa, Tea and Coffee sectors to improve farmer incomes. The cocoa sector breakout focused on the Cocoa Living Income Task Force, the Tea breakout a continuation of the conversation with the Malawi 2020 stakeholders and the introduction of a pricing tool that was developed to encourage the payment of living wages and incomes for tea and beyond, and the coffee session an initial discussion on the economic viability on the payment of Living Income.

View Cocoa Presentation

View Tea Presentation