2021 Annual Report

In the southeastern region of Andhra Pradesh, Nimmaka Varahalamma grew up believing that women were supposed to stay at home with the kids while their husbands went to work.

At the time, she was caring for her two young children and rarely interacted with people outside of her household. “The idea of talking to new people, let alone traveling outside the house unaccompanied, was extremely nerve-racking for me,” she admits.

Things look very different for Nimmaka today. Along with thousands of other women farmers, she joined the TechnoServe Sustainable Livelihoods for Smallholder Farmers program, with grant funding from the Walmart Foundation.

Working to improve farmer livelihoods in multiple crops, the TechnoServe team focused especially on improving women’s standing within farmer groups. The team trained women farmers in governance, business, and crop procurement skills, improving their confidence and shifting mens’ perception of their abilities.

After working with 14,171 women in 27 farmer producer groups, TechnoServe helped many of them achieve leadership roles, and women’s overall membership in these groups grew by 65%.

Today, 57-year-old Nimmaka is the chairperson and a director of the Manyam Sahaja Farmer Producer Company (FPC). “The program helped increase [the women’s] knowledge about the FPC and created a sense of ownership,” Nimmaka relates. “They now treat the meetings and all other FPC activities as part of their work.” 

Just this past year, the Manyam Sahaja FPC has added 106 women farmers under Nimmaka’s leadership, and its board now has six female directors. 

While Nimmaka is eager to make even more progress, she still can’t believe how far she’s come, having joined the FPC “at a time when women hardly ever stepped out of their houses.”

“Today, I lead an FPC with over 750 farmer members, of whom nearly 46% are women!”

In Botswana, Itumeleng Kanuntonga identified new markets for her water purification business and increased her staff from 19 to 25.

In Peru, Ermelinda Vargas learned new business skills that allowed her to reopen her hostel safely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And in Brazil, Simone Simones turned her kitchen garden into a profitable enterprise that supplies fresh vegetables to local schools, and has increased its weekly revenues from $20 to $100.

These three entrepreneurs may be working in different sectors in different countries, but they have all benefited from a global partnership between TechnoServe and Anglo American that began 10 years ago in Chile.

TechnoServe and Anglo American began working together in 2011 to help create vibrant, diversified economies in communities where few existed beyond the mining value chain. Based on the success in Chile, the partnership subsequently expanded to Botswana, Peru, Brazil, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. 

Adapted to each country, the partnership’s programs support the growth of local enterprises; strengthen value chains and help link local farmers to high-value markets; build the skills and connections of people who have been excluded from job opportunities; and integrate local businesses into mining supply chains. The partnership works to sustain this progress by strengthening the capacity of government institutions to support economic growth.

Since 2011, the partnership has helped participating local businesses generate an additional $111 million in revenue, supported more than 23,000 jobs, and helped more than 1,000 young people find employment or start their own micro-enterprise. 

“We’ve learned to capture and sustain clients and to turn challenges into opportunities,” reports another program entrepreneur, Teresa Blanco in Peru. “We have become a true business.”

In the lush highlands of East Africa where coffee originated, climate change is threatening a longtime way of life.

Day after day, smallholder coffee farmers work to grow enough high-quality coffee to support their families. But they must increasingly battle unpredictable weather, new pests, new crop diseases, and more frequent natural disasters.

Fortunately, regenerative agriculture offers farmers hope – not only to protect their livelihoods but to actually improve the environment around them.

In Kenya and Ethiopia, TechnoServe is partnering with Nespresso on its AAA Sustainable Quality™ Program to help nearly 70,000 coffee-farming households to improve their livelihoods through regenerative business solutions. This involves:

• Capturing carbon: Planting shade trees on farms not only improves coffee quality, but helps absorb more carbon from the air. So far, farmers in the program have planted more than 1.1 million trees.

• Reducing water pollution: Coffee wet mills improve coffee quality but can also produce wastewater runoff. TechnoServe has helped wet mills in the Nespresso program to adopt a natural, effective solution: planting wetlands with vetiver grass to filter out residues. This has prevented 56,000 cubic meters of contaminated waste water from being discharged into rivers each year. 

• Improving soil health: While shade trees improve soil health, mulching also prevents soil erosion and regulates temperatures to help coffee trees withstand drier weather.

• Managing pests and diseases: Farmers learn how to reduce or eliminate  their usage of synthetic inputs like pesticides, instead using integrated pest and disease management to protect both their crops and the environment around them.

These techniques literally pay off for farmers, as they grow more, higher quality, environmentally friendly coffee that they sell at better prices, far into the future. 

Ann Mugaga, for instance, is a 51-year-old single mother of two in south-central Kenya. Since learning new farming techniques from the AAA program, she now grows three times as much coffee as before.

With the big jump in her coffee proceeds, she has purchased a dairy cow and was able to send both her children to high school and college.

“There was no hope for me if I continued doing the same things as I was doing. The AAA training changed all that,” she says. “Now my children can go to whatever level of education they want, and I will pay from the coffee payments.”

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic upended traditional training models. Now, TechnoServe is expanding its digital outreach to improve services to clients for the long term.

María Roselia Alonzo is one of them. Running a small grocery store in Patzicía, Guatemala, María wakes at 6 a.m. and finally turns off the lights of her store at 10 p.m.

Her busy schedule made it nearly impossible to access business training, despite her keen desire to improve her shop. “I didn’t keep track of my expenses and costs,” she recalls. “I had a business that worked, but I didn’t have a technical basis for my investments.”

Many entrepreneurs are like María, with long hours on location at their businesses. While the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated remote learning models, a combined digital and in-person learning approach can make business training more accessible and efficient for entrepreneurs under any circumstances.

TechnoServe has therefore worked to significantly scale its digital training in 2021–with the following results:

• As of December 2021, 52% of all TechnoServe clients are supported through digitally enabled projects. This is up from 4% in 2020. (“Digitally enabled” projects are those that use at least one digital tool in their remote/blended learning, reach more than 50% of clients through digital tools, and digitally monitor client engagement).
• 74% of TechnoServe entrepreneurship projects provide digital and blended training for their participants.
• 80% of TechnoServe projects use digital tools as a part of their training and capacity building approach.

When María joined TechnoServe’s Impulsa tu Empresa entrepreneurship program, she received much of her training over her smartphone, and could watch the instructional videos whenever convenient.

“I find that the distance learning styles with videos is good,” says María. “Having videos allows me to see things several times.” She also enjoys consulting in-person with her TechnoServe business advisor.

Today, María has improved her cashflow and inventory purchasing, and is now working to expand her store. She is amazed at how much she has achieved with a small device in a rural corner of the world:

“Even though I consider myself a technological [novice], I have been able to have video calls and access the training platform…from my cell phone!”

Smallholder farmers are the backbone of food production, providing roughly 83% of all food grown around the world. But they’re often the most vulnerable to climate change.

Helping them improve their climate resilience on an individual basis is difficult, with millions of smallholder farmers around the world. So TechnoServe is working with agribusinesses that buy crops from these farmers on a large scale.

Through the Commercial Agriculture for Smallholders and Agribusiness (CASA) Technical Assistance Facility (TAF) program, TechnoServe helps companies identify and invest in climate-smart, inclusive business models.

These solutions not only make business sense, but improve the climate resilience and incomes of the smallholder farmers in company supply chains.

One such company is Kentaste, Kenya’s largest manufacturer of coconut-based products, which buys coconuts from over 2,000 farmers. TechnoServe identified both ways to improve Kentaste’s coconut value chain that addressed both business and environmental needs.

TechnoServe is now helping Kentaste implement these “win-win” recommendations, such as using coconut husks to produce biochar. A source of both renewable fuel and a way to improve soil, biochar can reduce the company’s energy costs and emissions while providing its farmers with organic mulch that can improve soil health and carbon sequestration.

With this approach, agribusinesses across Africa can reduce climate risks, improve the resilience of farmers in their supply chains, reduce their own emissions, and save money at the same time.

About CASA TAF: Funded by the U.K. Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, CASA TAF aims to support catalytic change in how investors view and invest in agribusinesses that source from smallholders in Africa and Asia. Through CASA TAF, TechnoServe is working alongside seven development financial institutions  and impact investors to provide inclusive technical assistance (TA) to 35 agribusinesses that work with smallholder supply chains, ultimately benefiting over 100,000 smallholder suppliers in five years.

In Benin, 43% of economically active women work in agriculture, but only about a third are paid for their labor.

This inequality extends to the cashew industry, which represents the country’s second most important export crop. But in recent years, TechnoServe has helped women in this sector take major steps forward.

The BeninCajù program, a partnership between TechnoServe and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), works with 90,000 smallholder cashew farmers to increase yields, boost revenue, and promote domestic processing. 

The team helped specifically helped boost women’s engagement in the sector by:

• Holding agronomy, business, and gender-awareness trainings with both men and women;
• Helping create savings and loan groups–comprised of 70% women–where members could access financial services, learn financial management skills, and network;
• Working to change the bylaws of cashew cooperatives in order to increase the share of women as members and leaders;
• Encouraging cashew processors to place more women in senior positions; and
• Promoting greater extension services for women farmers and gender awareness among government and farmer groups.

By the end of 2021, women’s membership in cashew farmer cooperatives had increased from 20% to nearly 33%, and the country’s umbrella organization of cashew producers had elected its first woman president of its board of directors as well as its first woman treasurer.

Nearly 40% of the farmers trained by Benin’s cashew extension services are now women, and processing firms have increased the number of women in management positions.

Some of the greatest progress has been within women’s own homes. “Thanks to the [training] learnings, a lot is changing,” reports one woman cashew farmer. “Our husbands let us teach our boys to cook and clean, which was never done before. This helps the girls and allows them to learn their lessons better.”