Access to Finance

Hundreds of thousands of farmers in Ghana depend on cocoa for their livelihoods. This business is making sure those farmers earn a decent living. One of the country’s largest exports, cocoa employs approximately 800,000 farming families across Ghana. “It’s the biggest vocation, the biggest source of livelihood in these communities,” says Nelson Adubofour, head of the Kuapa Kokoo Farmers’ Union.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve offered hundreds of coffee businesses the capital and training they need to succeed. But to truly maximize their impact, these businesses sometimes require additional support. That’s why, in partnership with USAID Feed the Future, we launched a Resilience Fund that provides $20,000 grants to some of our highest-performing client businesses in Colombia and Peru.

Certifications give consumers insights into where their coffee comes from. But with so many certifications out there, figuring out what each one means can be challenging. Here's a short guide to help you understand the major coffee certifications—and what getting certified means for our client businesses and coffee farmers.

A successful service delivery model creates value both for farmers and the service provider. This joint report analyzes 10 borrowers in Root Capital's loan portfolio, exploring the impact and economic sustainability of their farmer extension services. It also identifies opportunities for improving and scaling these services to support farmers.

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Photo: USAID/Siegfried Modola Root Capital and the IKEA Foundation are announcing a new partnership, worth €4.8 million, to help 260,000 smallholder farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda increase their income and adapt to climate change. The grant builds on the success of a previous partnership, through which Root Capital supported dozens of Kenyan agricultural businesses, helping them break the cycle of poverty in rural communities.

For decades, the indigenous Awajún people of northern Peru have struggled to overcome systemic poverty, discrimination, and violence. Now, as members of the APROCAM cooperative, they’re attaining higher incomes—and a better quality of life. In Peru’s northern Amazon, Awajún farmers struggled for years to eke out a living growing cacao on the banks of the Utcubamba River. Completely reliant on…

For the Maya, bees and their honey have always been sacred. Bees are a symbol of fertility and abundance; kaab, the Mayan word for bee, can also be translated as “force,” “land,” or “world.” But for the Mayan producer-members of the EDUCE cooperative, honey isn’t just a part of their cultural heritage. It’s also their livelihood.

Twenty years ago, Ibu Rahmah worked as a small-scale trader in northern Sumatra, purchasing a few pounds of hand-picked coffee cherries from individual farmers and reselling them to individual traders. In 2009, she organized 37 coffee farmers into the Ketiara cooperative. Less than a decade later, under her chairmanship, it has grown to be one of Indonesia’s most successful and…

Throughout Latin America, the coffee industry was crippled by the spread of coffee leaf rust—known as la roya—in 2013. Yields fell by as much as 80 percent. Some cooperatives failed. But at the foothills of the Andes mountains, C.A.C. Pangoa had developed the vision and tools to help farmers weather the storm. Pangoa first became a Root Capital client in…

Like many of Root Capital’s clients, The Village Nut Company operates on razor-thin margins. Credit is essential for the enterprise to be able to purchase macadamia nuts at a fair price and pay farmers on time. When we made our first loan to Village Nut in 2015—$450,000 in trade credit—the business was working with 6,000 producers and earning $1 million…