“Flexible and Specific”: Mary Devlin on best practices when training staff on sustainable sourcing

The trainings are largely based off of the Smallholder Agricultural Market Support (SAMS) Guidance, which Tanager helped the WFP to develop back in 2017. Like the guidance, the trainings are designed to be both flexible and specific: we can’t anticipate every situation in every country that could occur in the future, but we also know that if we just provide general statements then it’s not really good guidance. That being said, one of the main things we consider when preparing for a training is how much experience country offices have with smallholder programming, since we want to provide information that is both relevant and applicable. We’ve facilitated training sessions for both individual country offices as well as for regional bureaus.

Dhimsa Coffee Farmer Producer Company helps Indian farmers make gains: Meet Manikyam & Pottangi

Below, in their own words, the president of Dhimsa Coffee Farmer Producer Company and a farmer associated with the FPC talk about how working with Tanager has increased their income and crop yields.

An open letter on International Women’s Day from Tanager President Ana Bilik

Today, as the world celebrates International Women’s Day, I reflect back on how I commemorated IWD in 2020, on the cusp of a pandemic that would change our very definition of normal. On this day last year, I sat on a panel with esteemed Tanager leaders and gender advisors Maureen Munjua, Sita Zougouri, and Caroline Mukeku. We talked about advances in women’s economic empowerment in the countries where we live, and the work that is still needs to be done.

Romain Kenfack on the journey from COVID to recovery for women farmers in Burkina Faso

The first impact on women here in Burkina Faso is that it limited their access to the poultry market. During the lockdown, the main urban cities were closed, so the goods could no longer come to the cities. Most of the poultry produced by women is sold in the urban markets, so since the urban market was closed, they had to store their poultry. This means they had to increase their spending to feed them and house them, which created additional, and unexpected, expenses. Also, women couldn’t access some basic inputs like feed and poultry vaccinations services. Those are the key impacts that affected women. So women were limited to very little income in the first few months of lockdown.