A CALL TO ACTION: By Ana Bilik, President, Tanager
The Sustainable Development Goals have become a common set of metrics behind a movement, “a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet.” While we have the will to reach these ambitious goals, our collective efforts remain siloed. NGOs and the private sector work to create impact from important but diverse perspectives, which commonly break into two broad categories:
- sector-specific work focused on impact along an area of technical expertise, such as gender or nutrition, and
- crop or commodity-specific work focused on creating impact for farmers along one crop or commodity supply chain.
We can go further together by building multi-stakeholder partnerships that focus on a geographic region, are driven by the private sector and foundations, incorporate data and learning at every stage of implementation, and place the farmers’ lives and livelihoods at the center.
Tanager implements both crop-specific and sector-specific interventions – we know how effective these approaches can be. In India, the Shubh Mint project has made noteworthy gains to farmers’ income from mint. In Burkina Faso, the SELEVER II project addresses gender and nutrition gaps by working through poultry supply chains.
However, these interventions tackle either a portion of farmers’ income or specific challenges that farmers face. Issues of poverty and income are bigger than any one commodity and intersect with issues of gender inequality and dietary diversity. Interventions could have a deeper impact by working on multiple crops or income streams on the economic side and addressing complementing social concerns including gender inequality and dietary diversity.
The Living Income Benchmark – developed by the Sustainable Food Lab, ISEAL, and GIZ – gives us the ability to quantify how much a farmer needs to have a decent quality of life in any specific geographic region. This place-based approach allows us to identify farmers’ income needs, and gaps. On-farm and off-farm income both make up a farm economic model. With that complete financial picture, we can address how to best help a farmer achieve a living income. Even when a project helps create a large increase in income from a specific crop, we must ask ourselves whether that is sufficient for a farmer to reach a living income. If it is not, it imperative to augment the farmers’ income with other crops on-farm and off-farm income streams. Access to markets with various crops is vital to the success of this type of holistic intervention.
Much like the SDGs, we have the will to create this type of multi-sector approach to improve incomes and well-being. Funding realities are the persistent impediment. Our sector could be far more effective and efficient if we bundled funding and deployed these resources in a specific geographic region, tackling a diverse range of priorities at one time, while maintaining a focus on what each donor knows, and does well. This approach will not achieve the SDGs on its own, but it is a way to make our funding dollars go further and leverage areas of expertise to create lasting impact.
